City hears cleanup options for recreation complex
Published 1:30 am Thursday, February 19, 2026
Following an informational meeting hosted last week by the City of Homer, the Homer Education and Recreation Center’s future outlook — while lengthy and perhaps costly — seems a bit less dire.
Last Thursday, Feb. 12, Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation Brownfields Lead Flannery Ballard shared with members of the public an overview of hazardous materials in the HERC buildings as well as results of recent soil tests. She also shared potential next steps for the City of Homer and the HERC based on an Analysis of Brownfields Cleanup Alternatives.
Brownfields program qualifications
Ballard explained that according to a specific federal definition, a brownfield is a property where the expansion, redevelopment or reuse of which may be complicated by the presence of potential presence or a hazardous substance, pollutant or contaminant.
“Think basically of old canneries. Think of abandoned tank farms, old schools, former military sites, dry cleaners, gas stations, mine sites, etc.,” she said. “Generally speaking, these are going to be buildings that are abandoned. They’re like an eyesore in the community, and the community wants to do something with it.”
Brownfield properties are required by the program to have a “reuse” — in Alaska, brownfields are most commonly repurposed into recreational or green spaces; community centers; historical, cultural or education centers; gardens; affordable housing; mixed-use and more. Ballard gave an example of a recent DEC Brownfields Program project, a former junkyard in Delta Junction that was transformed into a public trail system.
“Over a couple of years, we were able to fence off some of the more contaminated areas and then connect (the property) with their park system so that now there’s a really beautiful set of trails that go through this old junkyard,” she said.
To receive funding through the Brownfields Program, Ballard further explained that a site has to meet the federal definition of a brownfield property; it must have an eligible, public applicant; and it must have a plan for reuse.
“We can’t help private individuals — I can’t help Mr. Smith with his home heating oil tank, but I can help the City of Homer with a public building,” Ballard said.
To date, since the program’s start in 2003, they’ve helped about 200 projects across the state of Alaska, providing site-specific technical assistance, assessments and cleanup services.
“Our program manages an inventory of brownfields across the state. We assist stakeholders in applying for different grants, we provide regulatory guidance, we provide and facilitate community outreach, and we conduct training opportunities across the state,” Ballard said. “The main thing that we offer, sort of our bread and butter, is what we call our DBAC.”
Homer applied for the DEC Brownfield Assessment and Cleanup program, which Ballard described as a sort of competitive statewide grant, to assess the HERC property.
“It’s more like a grant of services, so instead of just writing a check, we help procure services worth that amount of money,” she said. “Once you’re kind of in the pipeline with us, we try and take you as far as we can.”
HERC findings
Through the DBAC program, consultants reviewed previous hazardous building materials inventories, conducted a data gap analysis, performed additional sampling of building materials and soils and developed an Analysis of Brownfield Cleanup Alternatives.
A study conducted in 2023 confirmed that both HERC buildings contained hazardous materials, but only completed a limited hazmat assessment on the larger building, HERC 1, and did not test soils around the building. Ballard said that the data gap analysis conducted last year found that HERC 2 had been “fully characterized” and no further action was needed, while HERC 1 had been fully characterized for asbestos and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, but not lead. In addition to testing the HERC 1 building materials for lead and the soils for lead and PCBs, consultants also collected samples of any “undocumented” building materials that presumably contained asbestos or PCBs.
The good news, Ballard said, is that based on the results of the soil testing, no soil remediation or cleanup is necessary.
According to Ballard, while lead and PCBs were detected in the soil samples taken from around the outside perimeter of the HERC building, both were below human health cleanup levels. Arsenic was also detected in the soil, but is believed to be naturally occurring.
“Across the Kenai Peninsula, there is naturally occurring arsenic, and because it was a uniform concentration across the site, it is thought to be naturally occurring,” she said.
Asbestos was not detected in the soil samples.
“From my world, this is excellent, excellent news,” Ballard said. “That means that there’s no soil remediation or cleanup necessary, which can be very expensive.”
Inside the buildings, the consultants found lead-based paint above the regulatory limit on multiple surfaces in HERC 2 and on the windows, doors and sills of HERC 1. The surfaces in HERC 1 have since been treated and encapsulated in order to provide safe continued public use of the building.
The largest issue comes with the level of PCB containing materials, which does not exceed federal regulatory limits but does exceed the limit that would be accepted by any landfills within the state.
“You’re going to have to send any of that stuff out of state, which is also what’s driving our cost,” Ballard said.
Next steps
As part of the ABCA, the Brownfields Program evaluated five cleanup alternatives with rough order magnitude cost estimates to help the City of Homer and community make informed decisions on next steps.
“Basically the EPA just wants to ensure that Brownfields recipients have looked at all the different opportunities to dispose of or clean up a site, and they want you to evaluate for effectiveness, feasibility and cost,” Ballard said. “It is also an opportunity for the public to participate in the cleanup process.”
Among the suggestions in the ABCA developed for the HERC property are a no-action alternative, where the city does nothing with the property and incurs no cost. A second option is to encapsulate the lead-based paint in both buildings, which is estimated to cost about $60,000 to implement and would address lead-based paint in the short term but would not address any other hazardous materials or allow the city to move forward with repurposing the property. A third option would be to conduct further testing, which consultants recommended only in conjunction with another alternative and may prolong demolition and repurposing of the property.
“We could keep testing to really dial in — what has PCBs, where is the asbestos — to see if we can really isolate it, and if we wanted to dispose of the buildings, we could then take that knowledge just to separate out all the contamination to hopefully make costs go down a little bit,” Ballard said.
The fourth option would include abatement, with local disposal of asbestos-containing materials and removal and disposal of the remaining structure outside the state. According to the ABCA report on the City of Homer website, because no local landfills accept disposal of lead-based paint or PCB-containing materials, only asbestos-containing materials would be removed from the building and disposed of in the Central Peninsula Landfill. The rest of the construction waste would then be transported to Oregon for disposal.
This option is described as “moderately difficult” and would require further testing of materials and may prolong repurposing. The cost is also estimated at $10.3 million.
The fifth option is to dispose of everything outside of the state. While this is the most expensive option at an estimated $10.5 million, it is also described as “fairly easy” since no further testing would be required, though an abatement contractor would be required.
Ballard also noted that the estimated costs for the various ABCA options were a timely “snapshot.”
“Cost is really, really hard to dial in, especially in the current economic climate where things are changing very, very rapidly,” she said. “So the contingency pricing on this is anywhere from minus 30 to plus 50%, and it is changing with time.”
Regarding next steps, if Homer chooses to pursue cleanup funding, the first step would be to finalize the ABCA.
“All that really means is we put it up for public comment and let the public weigh in,” Ballard said. “After 30 days or so, the DEC and Homer would respond to any pertinent public comments. We would go with the alternative that the community would like, and then we put a seal on the document that says ‘this is finalized.’
“That does not commit Homer. If in six months or two years from now, you want to change your mind, it doesn’t commit you to any certain track, but it does say that Homer has gone through the public process and this is what the community is feeling at this time.”
The next step after that would be to pursue funding options. Ballard recommended that the city apply for an EPA cleanup grant and also talk to legislators about a federal appropriation or congressional earmark for any remaining funds needed to address the HERC.
“This is kind of my world. I help communities apply for and use the grant that they received through the EPA,” she said.
She discussed the old elementary school in Kake as an ongoing brownfield project example, which she described as “way, way worse than the HERC buildings.” The former school building is “highly contaminated,” containing PCBs, asbestos and lead-based paint. Because of the presence of PCBs, the city of Kake is required to send the whole building to the Lower 48 for disposal and was previously given a cost estimate of $7 million to do so.
Ballard explained that through the Brownfields program, Kake received a $2 million EPA cleanup grant to cover the cleanup of hazardous materials. The city also received $3.6 million in congressional funding to cover the teardown and removal of the building materials and contaminated soil. According to the City of Kake’s website, further funding is needed to redevelop the site after the removal of all hazardous materials and debris.
“There are projects on the same scale as the HERC building across the state,” Ballard said. “It seems like an impossible project, but there are lots of examples of buildings across the state where we’re doing the exact same thing in other communities.
“It is a slow process. We like to say that cleanup, especially contamination, is an iterative process … so it can take a long time, but there are lots of success projects out there as well.”
City of Homer Community Development Director Julie Engebretsen said via email Friday that no decisions have been made yet, but that she expects the city to host a community meeting sometime this year to finish out the current ABCA process and select an alternative to address the HERC buildings. Whether that meeting would take place this spring or in the fall is still undetermined.
If the city and community choose to pursue an EPA cleanup grant, a new conceptual site reuse plan would be needed, she wrote. Additional community meetings would be held to address this. Engebretsen also noted that it would be a Homer City Council and city budget decision if and when the city would apply for an EPA cleanup grant.
“These buildings and the property are complicated, and it’s a very slow, complicated process to work through the issues,” she wrote. “The good news is that through the work with DEC, we are getting closer to being able to apply for a cleanup grant and ask for a federal appropriation. That’s a step in the right direction and we’re further along with these buildings than we were a year ago.”
Learn more about the past analyses and reports on the HERC buildings and the HERC hazardous material cleanup and revitalization plan on the City of Homer website at www.cityofhomer-ak.gov/planning/herc-hazardous-material-cleanup-and-revitalization-plan.
