We may be able to turn the economy around and expand our support of vital social service programs. The industries themselves are wary. And it's real high-powered stuff. The aerospace giant built its next new plant in Pierce County instead. Other companies want zoning that will protect industrial land uses from intrusion by housing and retailers.
Nobody knows how bad the problem is, but they do know there are Superfund sites out there.
The entire 485-acre Harbor Island has already been declared a federal Superfund site, with more likely to be added to the list. No one knows how much it would cost to clean it up, although estimates run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. And few, if any, businesses will take on the risk of buying contaminated land and being saddled with the cost of a clean-up. Pollution problems in the industrial area stretch back more than a century. From one point of view, the existence of the industrial area is one big environmental insult, created when early settlers began filling in thousands of acres of marsh to create the flat industrial land that was in such short supply in hilly Seattle.