Did Manchester’s company dump the contaminated soil here at Chollas landfill?
Here’s one of the latest under-reported San Diego scandals for you.
The very company that the Navy selected to redevelop the 70 plus acres at NAVWAR is right now being sued by the City of San Diego for allowing contaminated soil to being dumped at an inactive city landfill and denying it.
Earlier in 2024, the Navy chose Manchester Financial to replace the agency’s obsolete facilities and remake the rest of the 70.3-acre military campus with private development. Its partners on the endeavor are McLean, Virgina-based Edgemoor Infrastructure and Real Estate.
You remember Manchester, you know Doug Manchester, the hotelier and former Union-Tribune owner — and chair of Manchester Financial Group. He was considered “Mr. San Diego” by the establishment for years. In her January piece, Jennifer Van Grove reported:
Manchester, a prominent hotel and commercial development firm chaired by Doug Manchester, was similarly awarded the 12-acre Navy Broadway Complex in 2006. As part of that deal, the developer erected a waterfront office building for the Navy Region Southwest, Naval Facilities Engineering Command Southwest and Navy Region Southwest Reserve Component Command. But it sold off most of the leasehold in 2020 to real estate developer IQHQ.
Manchester Financial Group is based out of the Manchester Financial Centre at 2550 Fifth Ave. in San Diego.
Now, the city of San Diego is suing Manchester Financial for dumping contaminated soil from its North Embarcadero development at a city landfill.
As CBS8 reported:
In a non-conformed lawsuit, the city says beginning in 2018 subcontractors working on Manchester Financial’s massive redevelopment of the former Navy Broadway Complex located on the North Embarcadero told the city that it had clean, native soil that needed to be dumped.
The company, according to the complaint, had wanted to place the soil at Miramar Landfill, however, to save space at the landfill, the city said crews could dump the soil at the now-closed Chollas Landfill instead.
From October 2018 through January 2019, subcontractors working for Manchester Financial transported what they called native soil to Chollas Landfill in Oak Park.
Environmental regulators soon discovered that the soil was contaminated and contained separate liquids, something that was not allowed to be used for landfill cover. Instead, according to the lawsuit, the liquid was visibly dripping from the dump trucks that were disposing of the soil at the landfill.
It was on Thursday, Feb, 22, that San Diego City Attorney Mara Elliott filed a breach of contract complaint against the developer and its subcontractor, AMG Demolition & Environmental Service, Inc., in San Diego Superior Court. It seeks $5 million to repay the city for the cost associated with cleaning up the developer’s alleged mess.
Elliot made a statement, in part of which stated:
“(Manchester’s) attempt to saddle development costs on city taxpayers while contaminating our environment is reprehensible. (The developer) ignored our environmental laws, demonstrated a blatant disregard for regulatory directives and broke nearly every commitment made to city leaders, leaving San Diego taxpayers to foot the bill for millions of dollars in cleanup costs. The city of San Diego will not tolerate that type of corporate misconduct.”
Manchester Pacific Gateway project
U-T reporters Jennifer Van Grove and Lori Weisberg wrote that Doug Manchester said late Thursday that the lawsuit “absolutely has no merit,” and would not comment further. The company’s president and CEO, Ted Eldredge, is currently in Europe, Manchester said and was not available to respond to requests seeking comment. A representative of San Diego-based AMG, reached late Thursday afternoon, declined to comment, noting that the company had not yet seen the complaint. San Diego Union-Tribune
More from Van Grove and Weisberg:
The lawsuit is an escalation of a yearslong dispute between the city and the developer …. The alleged wrongdoing stems from construction-related activities in 2018 and 2019. The city claims that Manchester Financial and AMG Demolition violated the terms of a specially negotiated, November 2018 right-of-entry permit for the closed South Chollas landfill in Oak Park.
The permit allowed the project subcontractor to deposit 130,000 cubic yards of “clean native soil” from the Broadway complex site as cover soil at the shuttered landfill. The permit was issued after the developer received a special waiver from the Regional Water Quality Control Board to deposit clean soil. The clean designation is important as state law prohibits the deposit of new waste at shuttered landfills, and was a condition of the waiver and permit.
But between November 2018 and January 2019, AMG dumped contaminated soil at the Chollas landfill, the city alleges. The soil contained wood, concrete asphalt, metal, plastic and liquids, according to a soil investigation report referenced in the complaint.
According to the complaint, Manchester and AMG refused to take responsibility for the waste and insisted they had only delivered clean soil. As a result, the city eventually removed the contaminated soil from the Chollas landfill and disposed of it at the Miramar landfill, at its own expense. The city also regraded the Chollas landfill to bring it back into compliance with regulatory requirements.
Part of the problem with the scandal is that according to reporter Van Grove, the entire NAVWAR “proposed land exchange is modeled after the agency’s 2006 agreement with Manchester Financial Group for the Navy Broadway Complex.” The one involving the suit.
If not to complicate things even more, as Van Grove and Weisberg write:
The latest legal dispute with the city comes as Manchester Financial is planning to build a 36-story, 1,150-room hotel on a nearly 2-acre parcel between Pacific Highway and North Harbor Drive on the former Navy Broadway Complex. The project is dependent on the company’s ability to find an equity partner and a construction loan for the $550 million project, Eldredge said last month. His hope, though, is to break ground sometime this year.
“The project is completely ready to go, and we could break ground tomorrow but the debt market has changed quite a bit, and capital markets are not real excited with ground-up construction,” he told the Union-Tribune in January. “Once interest rates stop going up and the capital market stabilizes we’ll go out to market and build.”
It’s nice to know that here in San Diego, you can be involved in suits from not cleaning up after the last huge development and be rewarded with another huge redevelopment pact. San Diegans are very forgiving – or maybe it’s just San Diegans are very forgetting.
{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
It wasn’t until the very last paragraph did Van Grove and Weisberg lay the bombshell:
“Earlier this year, Manchester Financial was selected by the Navy to replace the agency’s obsolete NAVWAR facilities and remake the rest of the 70.3-acre military campus with private development.”
CBS8 didn’t mention the connection at all. This is the big diff between citizen journalism and corporate journalism.
And, if that parcel down on Broadway and Harbor was dirty, it could never compare to the dirty site at the NAVWARS site. It will be incredibly costly to clean up that location.
The truck and trailer can hold about 20 cubic yards. So, at no time in 6,500 truck trips to Chollas did anyone notice anything? Spent my whole career in construction and this makes no sense unless someone was paid off. This could never have happened without collusion.
That was my question as well: this went on for 3 months and no one noticed?
Question is: is this the type of company that should be in charge of the NAVWAR redevelopment? One our city attorney claims “ignored our environmental laws, demonstrated a blatant disregard for regulatory directives and broke nearly every commitment made to city leaders, leaving San Diego taxpayers to foot the bill for millions of dollars in cleanup costs,” and called it a “type of corporate misconduct.”
A few thoughts on this.
First, it happens more often than you would think. I am familiar with a project that resulted in a substantial amount of hazardous waste. Although the contract specifically required the materials to be transported to an EPA approved Class II facility, the material was transported to an native american reservation in Arizona. I never saw the trucking manifests, but I was told that they were correct. The material just went elsewhere, to a site where it was cheaper to dump it. I also know of another project where lead paint was dumped off a pier near LA. Contractors and sub-contractors can, and do, thwart the best intentions.
Second, the parties involved in this have a history of doing things without permits, violating their permits etc. This is a matter of public record.
Third, always be wary of rich, old Catholic men who insist of being addressed as “Papa.”
Yea, and I have to say that I have personal experience digging holes in the ground as an equipment operator years ago in just about all of the Navy facilities. The scariest was digging up “old” defused armaments. I saw a sand pit on North Island they used to dump contaminated fuel into. Cutting into the tarmac at Miramar resulted in small geyser of airplane fuel. Dark, smelly dirt that came out of this complex was not natural. It will be a major, expensive, disruptive effort that will be impossible to put a price on until it’s over.
Of course, then there’s the Mission Bay waste dump.
Ahahahahahaha. I mean, really? Who woulda thunk it? Mr. San Diego indeed!
Ahahahahahaha. Corporate ‘journalism.’ You made a funny in the ironic humor patented by George Carlin.
And Frank, remember what I said about my dad being the Head Stock Clerk at Convair. He knew EVERYTHING that came in or out of those buildings. His signature was on tons of paperwork, had to be or it didn’t move. There’s stuff in the Mission Bay dump nobody knows about (or will admit to), but then most if not all responsible are dead now anyway. But he never swam in Mission Bay in all the years we lived in MB…
sealintheSelkirks
That dump story is a while other story and has been played out already — and is now below a park and beach like setting in southeast Mission Bay rec area. It has a name that I don’t recall at the moment. Do a word search here.
It caught my attention between CBS8 and the UT who was the citizen and who was the corporate journalist. LMFAO seal.
My dad and a lot of his buddies worked at Convair, Ryan and Solar in the 50s-70s. Most of them have died from cancer or neurological diseases. Connection with chemicals used in the aerospace business? You bet. And a lot of their trash wound up in the Mission Bay dump and elsewhere.
I’m 70 and IIRC when I was a kid there was a dump north of Harbor Drive just west of the airport. And the Mission Bay dump, did you ever wonder why Sea World Drive is like a roller coaster? Poor compaction over the dump.
FF – My dad worked at Convair 1960-62 when the recession hit. Do a word search on our search bar for Mission Bay Dump or words that effect.
The main problem with Sea World Drive is that it was built on a bridge of dirt over water. The dump does not explain the whole length of Sea World Drive having a problem. Highway 52 is built across the old dump at Miramar and it does suffer from the decaying material below.
Sea World drive needs to be redone again.
As to “wet” soil, well ya, the dirt came from a waterfront construction site where saltwater intrusion was part of the deal. Not sure if that’s the crime of the century.
BUT, to allow a builder to dump soil on city property without having a city worker check every load is foolish. If I take a load of greenery up to the Miramar landfill and the guy at the gate sees concrete and lumber in my load, I’m going to get $panked. It’s easy enough to put the cost of that inspector into the permit to dump.
This is what happens when you give a big shot free reign to do his thing. Campaign contributions buy privilege. (Sports Arena redevelopment anybody?)
Dump trucks are not allowed to leak water onto public roads on their way to the dump. Imagine the real scope of the cleanup if there were trucks leaking contaminated liquids on the way to Chollas.
A little levity…..
However, per CVC 23114 vehicles in California can discharge clean water and chicken feathers but only from live chickens. Cluck cluck!
Read this the other day and it made me really wonder what’s in that loose fill dump covered by a park & beach. Chemicals don’t care much about what they come in contact with…
Arsenic in landfills is still leaching into groundwater ? 20 years after colleagues and I learned how the ‘king of poisons’ could escape trash dumps
https://theconversation.com/arsenic-in-landfills-is-still-leaching-into-groundwater-20-years-after-colleagues-and-i-learned-how-the-king-of-poisons-could-escape-trash-dumps-223471
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But, like you intimated, nobody really cares because…it’s old news.
sealintheSelkirks