Courtaulds and the West Berkeley Brownfield Movement

The Courtaulds Aerospace property has long been known as one of the most seriously contaminated sites in west Berkeley. Two years prior to this hearing in 2000, both the San Francisco Regional Water Quality Control Board (SFRWQCB) and the California Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) moved in lockstep with other California and federal agencies to declare west Berkeley a “Brownfield”. This Brownfield or “Containment Zone” designation was modeled on the non-environmental cleanup state policy bestowed upon our city’s neighbor to the south, Emeryville.

The California deregulation process began in the mid-1990s with the water quality control board’s move to downgrade Berkeley’s and other East Bay groundwater resources and to then limit the State’s financial support for any remediation efforts. Somewhere in that regulatory process, the Board’s mission to protect human health and the environment was discarded.

The West Berkeley Brownfield movement was touted by many in the City of Berkeley as a work of genius. The developers and investors were praised for possessing some special kind of unique vision or skill. In truth, this State of California regulatory shift in Berkeley facilitated the greatest “taking” in our city’s real estate history. Like Courtaulds, the area’s developers were simply allowed to skirt the historic financial responsibility for industrial-site cleanup.

This non-cleanup reality was echoed in the comments of those residents speaking at the public hearing that night. Berkeley’s Zoning Adjustments Board was clearly unwilling to acknowledge the detrimental environmental impacts created by this “new science”. The “work” of DTSC and SFRWQCB over the last two decades, has unfortunately made Courtaulds’ lower regulatory standard for cleanup the norm, and not the exception, in both environmental management and for contaminated site reuse despite its toxic impacts.