Pollock Park Pollution Clean-Up Must Come First

Photos by Evan Brandt

Once the contamination is removed from Pollock Park, the borough will try to get funding to implement this master plan for a new park.

Updating and improving Pollock Park has become complicated after an environmental study of the two-acre site found heavy metal and other chemical contamination beneath the soil.

Nevertheless, having a master plan in place will help attract funding to pay for the park once the clean-up has occurred.

The clean-up will take at least 14 to 16 months from now according to Joseph Kraycik, a consulting geoscienctist with Environmental Standards, the Valley Forge-based firm that discovered the contamination.

Parks and Recreation Director Michael Lenhart addresses
environmental concerns during the Pollock Park meeting.

Funding for the clean-up could come from a variety of sources, said Michael Lenhart, Pottstown's director of parks and recreation. In fact, he said, he has already gathered the paperwork for the first grant application to the federal government.

Because the park is now considered a "brownfield," a name for former industrial sites that have contamination, it may actually be easier to attract funding to pay for the park, once the clean-up is done, said Lenhart.

And they're going to need it.

Because now that the park will be taken down to soil, all the trees,m pavement and vegetation removed, the estimated price has jumped from $300,000 to $600,000.

Residents also posed questions and expressed concern about the clean-up, whether they would be exposed and whether any previous exposure might have caused long-term health problems.

There were no immediate answers.

Here are the Tweets from the meeting.

A Place to Park on Pottstown's South Side

Pollock Park is located between South Street and Cross Street on Pottstown's south side.

More trees or fewer trees?

Keep the soccer field, the tennis courts and the basket ball court? Or get rid of them?

Lights?

A Gazebo?

These are the kinds of questions posed, answered and asked again Monday night during the first attempt at getting input on a concept plan for Pollock Park.

Your faithful blogger arrived 45 minutes late, as you no doubt realized, having read yesterday's post indicating I began the evening in Gilbertsville for a very short Douglass (Mont.) Supervisors meeting.

So forgive me if this report is less-than-complete.

The two-acre park is wedged in between South and Cross streets and is a neighborhood staple, if a little under-used.

In an attempt to change that, and with help from a grant from the PA Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, Simone Collins landscape architects met with a group of more than 20 people in the new community meeting room of the Pottstown Regional Public Library Monday night to get their thoughts.

There were a lot of them.

Many said they wanted to find ways to make the park safer, as well as more useful to the neighborhood. They worried about vandalism, but some said they didn't want lights.

Peter Simone, who heads up the landscape architecture firm, said in some parks they have installed motion sensor lights to cut down on vandalism.

There was also discussion of some sort of public art project and Assistant Borough Manager Justin Keller said the borough is currently working on an ordinance to make it easier to paint murals in the borough.

By the time the meeting was over, about 8:30 p.m., the idea board was packed with post-its and Simone said they would use those ideas to put together a draft plan to bring back to the residents.

That will occur on March 21, time and place to be announced.

In the meantime, here are the Tweets.