November 15, 2006

TERRASAN GROUP

New Ontario legislation in the works may eventually make the way easier for companies like Terrasan Group to seek out former industrial sites which can be demolished and redeveloped into beautiful spaces.

Redevelopment

Brownfields can become beautiful spaces

What others see as risk, Terrasan calls opportunity

IAN HARVEY

correspondent

In the normal course of events, a site with a potential of 1,110 linear feet of downtown urban waterfront would have most developers elbowing each other out of the way to ink a deal.

But the Welmet, a former munitions and castings factory site on the Welland Canal, is a brownfield and, as such, developing it would mean taking responsibility for cleaning it up.

Clean up adds risk and liability to the project, something most developers choose to avoid.

Louie Santaguida, though, is thrilled to have closed the deal which will see his company, Terrasan, buy the site along with parcels from both the City of Welland and the federal government to create a 10-acre package to be redeveloped into a mix of commercial and residential properties fronting on the canal.

“It’s been sitting for 15 or 20 years abandoned,” said Santaguida, president of Terrasan Group, which actively searches out and buys brownfields for redevelopment. “It’s going to be a beautiful development.”

Uttering “brownfield and beautiful” in the same phrase may seem like an oxymoron, but Santaguida has been tackling orphaned toxic pieces of land for some 20 years.

Terrasan Group is three companies: Terrasan Corp. which buys, cleans and redevelops brownfields, Terrasan Environmental which specializes in cleaning up hazardous sites and handling toxic materials, and Terrasan Remediation which deals with soil and ground water remediation technologies.

Santaguida is passionate about remediation and not only talks the talk but walks the walk as well.

Terrasan offices sit on a four acre former Malton A.B. Dick printing site which the company cleaned up and on which it built a 68,000-square-foot commercial structure which they also sublease to other tenants.

What’s more surprising is that it was all done in 10 months.

TERRASAN GROUP

The Lindsay Tire plant is among the properties tackled by Terrasan, whose work made way for redevelopment.

“We bought the land last January and we’ve moved in,” said Santaguida, adding the key to success is that brownfields can be turned around if there’s a willing partnership.

Generally, though, there’s reluctance in both financing and government to make things happen. Banks are sometimes hesitant because of the risk involved with toxic sites and governments are often too dogmatic about the land use.

“They say they want employment because the site was a former industrial site,” said Santaguida. “And that’s important. But industry is not coming back to some of these sites. They can’t afford to. And if you look at the areas, they’ve become residential.”

Despite new Ontario legislation in the works, there’s still too much of a disconnect between some of the players, he says.

“The legislation is important but we’re still two, three, four, five years away from getting a handle on it all,” he said. “Frankly, it’s taken too long.”

Terrasan’s approach has been to acquire the land and mitigate the risk through its own developed understanding of the issues and its knowledge of the Ministry of Environment’s goals.

There’s no shortage of brownfields – especially in the GTA – but Santaguida wishes the City of Toronto would learn from the surrounding municipalities in how to deal with the issue.

“We should be redeveloping these lands, intensifying them,” he said. “But there are so many other sites they really don’t have to.”

A case in point is the former Toronto Benjamin Moore paint factory at Keele Street and St. Clair Avenue, in the junction which was closed in 2000.

“It was the first paint factory Benjamin Moore owned in Canada and out of a list of bidders we were chosen, not because we’re the biggest but because we understood how to approach it so that there would be no liability to Benjamin Moore in the future.”

Mitigating the risk is one of the biggest issues facing environmental clean ups, the other, remains zoning.

“The city wants to put industrial there because of the new legislation, Grow Ontario, which says they should have employment centres there,” said Santaguida.

“But if you look at the neighbourhood, the stockyard is gone, everything is gone, it’s all residential there now and that’s what we want to put in, some residential highrise. We’re going to the Ontario Municipal Board next year.”

Contrast that with the former Trent Rubber facility which itself was a former munitions factory in Lindsay, Ontario.

TERRASAN GROUP

Terrasan works on excavation at a Brockport site.

There are 61 acres, a portion of which will need soil excavation. There’s also a building on site which will have to be “decommissioned.”

“But we’ll recycle 95 per cent of that material into our new building,” Santaguida says proudly saying it’s an example of how quickly things can move if there’s agreement.

“We were on the site a week after acquiring it.”

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