City Hall must pay $15,000 to remove three, pre-World War II gas
tanks from a downtown parking lot.
Gilroy – City Hall must pay $15,000 to remove three, pre-World War II gas tanks from a downtown parking lot.
That money is in addition to $22,525 the city paid to insure itself against any environmental mishaps at the northeast corner of Monterey and Lewis streets, where the nonprofit Garlic Festival Association is constructing a new headquarters. The city is shelling out the money because the cost of removing the tanks came in below a $50,000 deductible.
The cost burden fell to the city as part of a development deal with the Garlic Association. The nonprofit agency planned to construct a new headquarters on its Eigleberry Street parking lot, between Fifth and Sixth streets, but city leaders anxious to use the space for a future parking structure convinced them to build on the city-owned lot two blocks north.
As part of the deal, they agreed to shoulder the burden for any hazardous material cleanup.
The tanks unearthed at the site are each about the size of a sport utility vehicle and date back to a gas station from the 1920s, according to city officials. The tanks were discovered in mid-November as workers excavated an underground parking garage.
“We had a pretty good feeling that there were probably tanks there,” Gilroy Community Development Director Wendie Rooney said. “There were previous gas stations at two different times and we did paper research that indicated that there was a likelihood of gas tanks. We also did some testing for groundwater contamination. That’s where you get into the big bucks and that’s why we needed an insurance policy.”
Most recently used as a downtown parking lot, the site previously served as home to a Greyhound bus terminal, the Regal Petroleum Corporation Gas Station (from 1962 to 1977), and the older gas station (dating back to at least 1926), according to city officials.
Had petroleum seeped out of the tanks, the city’s $1 million insurance policy would have helped cover the pricey costs of soil removal and groundwater cleanup. The tanks were filled with sand and had not leaked, limiting costs to carting off the sand and dismantling the containers, Rooney said.
The discovery of the tanks delayed construction by just five days, said GFA Executive Director Brian Bowe.
Workers dug around the tanks until early December, when “we got to a point that the excavation could no longer continue until the tanks were removed,” Bowe said.
The GFA building is expected to be complete by Jan. 2008. For more than two decades, the agency has shared space with the Gilroy Chamber of Commerce in a white brick building facing Monterey Street, just north of Sixth Street.
The three-story building will house the GFA’s new headquarters, along with additional street-level commercial space and two floors of condominiums. While many downtown merchants grumbled about the loss of vital parking spaces, city officials lauded the project as a vital piece of downtown renewal, one that will give more prominence to the group that helped Gilroy earn its reputation as the Garlic Capitol.
