Although Oregon is on its way to finally establishing a set of toxic air rules, the final result won’t look quite like what many people had originally expected.

Prior to the Oregon Legislature‘s session earlier this year, the Department of Environmental Quality had been working on standards related to thresholds for the amount of cancerous and non-cancerous pollutants a facility could emit without having to take extra steps to control its emissions. Facility operators and manufacturers had pushed back against those limits.

In February, however, the industry stepped forward with Senate Bill 1541 as an alternate to the rules draft that DEQ was floating in front of legislators. The bill not only passed, but it was signed by Gov. Kate Brown, despite the fact that it was a far cry from her original recommendations.

“It’s being touted as an industry-backed bill,” Chad Darby, principal air quality consultant at Maul Foster & Alongi, said. “But really, in the end, there were people on both sides of the issue that supported Senate Bill 1541.”

Maul Foster & Alongi and other consulting firms have been following the path the toxic air plan has taken, stepping forward to help facility operators looking to take proactive steps to determine exactly where their emissions fell on the threshold scale.

That scale, however, has changed as a result of the passage of SB 1541. The new legislation basically doubles the thresholds that the DEQ will be allowed to set to determine whether facilities are in compliance. The cancer-risk threshold that was 25 excess cancers per million people, for example, is now set at 50 per million.

The legislation also addresses how the DEQ will deal with multisource areas such as industrial parks, where there are large concentrations of facilities that fall under the parameters of the toxic air rules. Originally, the rule called for the DEQ to look at any area that qualified as a multisource area – an approach that concerned many people that facility operators would shy away from areas such as industrial parks in order to avoid heavy concentrated areas.

Under the new legislation, the DEQ will select one area to study and then use the results to set up a process to be used as a starting point for managing similar areas.

One thing that hasn’t changed in light of the new legislation is the requirement that industry players will need to perform human health risk assessments.

“Any facility DEQ calls in for human health risk assessments with air permits will still need to do that,” Darby said.

With a November timeline for finalizing the state’s new toxic air rules, the DEQ is pulling together a committee to look at recommendations of final rules based on the new legislation. Public comment is expected to open in July, with a staff report and recommendations to follow in October. A vote on the final rules by the Environmental Quality Commission is expected during that group’s meeting in mid-November.

While the threshold increases have drawn criticism from some people, others say that while the new legislation may not be perfect, it allows Oregon to finally establish an air toxics program that might not otherwise have been fully funded.

Industrial facility operators will still be called upon by the DEQ to perform human risk assessments, and those results will be made available to the public.

Even with the new thresholds, industry experts are still recommending that facility operators take steps now to conduct their own testing.

“A number of facilities we’re working with are starting to look at where their risks come from,” Darby said. “We’ve been recommending they conduct a risk assessment similar to what DEQ will likely (keep) in its (final rules). We have done a couple dozen already for facilities, and most had (one or two) pollutant issues that were easily resolved or that they realized were being incorrectly calculated.”

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The team at Maul Foster & Alongi knew there was a lot riding on the cleanup of a polluted waterfront site that once held a wood treatment plant. If the Ridgefield, Washington, project didn’t pan out, there was a good chance the federal Environmental Protection Agency might label the area as a Superfund site.

Even before actual restoration work could start, a process the firm expected would take two months, the MFA team had to wade through five years of effort to obtain the proper permits.

Permits for river work are handed out by the U.S. Corps of Engineers. For the Ridgefield project, the process depended on intensive testing of river sediment, said Madi Novak, a principal scientist at MFA who also sits on the board of directors of the employee-owned environmental engineering and consulting firm.

“You have a dynamic environment in the river from natural forces plus people and boats that can affect the chemistry in sediment pollution,” Novak said. “When we have to do a cleanup, we take samples from the river bed, have them analyzed in a lab and then look for chemicals that tend to be persistent in the environment.”

Examples of pollutants are PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) and dioxins. Both chemicals accumulate in fish tissue and can have detrimental effects on people who eat the fish as well as birds and mammals.

Another aspect of river projects like the one in Ridgefield is limiting turbidity, a problem Novak’s firm encountered in the Ridgefield project.

“We have to keep it down during construction while also evaluating how the changing river bottom might impact ecology,” Novak said. “There’s lots of room for innovation in a development cleanup project and (in) identifying construction methods that have low-to-no impact on the environment.”

Novak’s firm used that innovation when dredging during the Ridgefield cleanup with a method called “precision dredging” that kept turbidity at a minimum.

“We use a specific type of construction equipment where a bucket is used when removing sediment that also encloses the water so we don’t lose fine sediment,” she said. “Traditional dredging stirs up sediment quite a bit, so this is a new style of dredging.”

There was good reason not to stir up sediment at the Ridgefield site. The 40-acre property had served for 30 years as the home of Pacific Wood Treating. When the company abandoned the site after declaring bankruptcy, it left behind what MFA “extensive soil, groundwater and sediment impacts … chlorinated solvents, petroleum hydrocarbons, pentachlorophenol and dioxin.”

In addition to precision dredging, Novak’s firm used “fish friendly” gravel to stabilize the bank and shoreline habitat restoration by using certain types of rocks that discourage predators and provide a safe fish habitat.

Brent Grening, CEO of the Port of Ridgefield, said Novak has been a major player in the cleanup process, which goes back 20 years to when the site was first abandoned by the wood treatment plant.

“She has a lot of passion for what she does and it comes through,” he said. “She does very high quality work and was very committed to putting this project together.”

Grening said Novak has been involved in the riverfront restoration project for the past six or seven years, which now has to come to the point that 43 acres of the port’s riverfront property has open space, walking paths and is shovel-ready for future development.

After excavating polluted sediment and stabilizing the bank at the Ridgefield site, the shoreline was replanted by MFA with native plants such as Wapato, a shrub native to the Pacific Northwest.

“The site is very much constructible,” Grening said. “We put in walking paths and it has been replanted for open spaces. The plants are starting to become established and the property is open to the public. The next thing to do is build a rail overpass for new access to the site.”

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Maul Foster & Alongi principal engineer Ted Wall has twice shared his expertise on brownfield cleanups and stormwater management with Chinese developers and design professionals visiting Portland.

Last month, Wall was the traveler. He recently returned from his first visit to China, where he attended an international symposium on urban stormwater management and hydrology in Beijing. While there, Wall also gave a series of lectures to Chinese design professionals, students and academics on cleaning up and redeveloping contaminated sites, such as former landfills and mines.

Wall’s visit to China on behalf of MFA is part of an effort by the Pacific Northwest engineering and consulting firm to forge greater connections with Chinese designers and developers. The aim is to collaborate with these industry peers on future projects in a country where rapid urban development has led to an increasing government interest in promoting stormwater management and brownfield cleanups.

“There is some sense that the next major initiative will be in the (brownfield) remediation and cleanup arena,” Wall said. “We’re well-positioned to provide a supportive role in both the stormwater and cleanup arenas.”

MFA, which has offices in Portland and Vancouver, Wash., isn’t the only metro-area firm touting its expertise in sustainable design to forge business opportunities in China. Other Portland-area firms like ZGF Architects and Fregonese Associates are capitalizing on a fascination among Chinese designers, developers, academics and government agencies with the city’s approach to urban design, said Robert Liberty, director of Portland State University’s Urban Sustainability Accelerator. The PSU program helps cities, including three in China, implement sustainability projects and policies.

Liberty has traveled to China to share Oregon’s philosophy on urban growth boundaries, and led tours for Chinese delegations visiting Portland. Along with questions about sustainable development in Portland, many of these visitors are curious about how the city manages to attract large numbers of college graduates and young professionals, Liberty said.

“They’re interested also in the story of how an urban place recreates itself around livability as an economic development strategy,” he said. “There is a surprising amount of interest in Portland. I invite them to the beautiful village of Portland. It would be like inviting someone from (Los Angeles) to Eugene.”

The thirst in China to learn more about sustainable urban growth is so great that while attending the University of Oregon as a doctorate student Hong Wu established a knowledge exchange program that connects American and Chinese design and development professionals. Last fall, she organized a West Coast tour for a dozen Chinese designers and developers and served as translator for the trip, which spotlighted environmentally conscious projects in Portland, Seattle and San Francisco. It was the second Chinese delegation led by Wu to meet with Wall and other MFA staffers while in Portland to learn from the firm’s expertise in the cleanup and redevelopment of brownfields and management of stormwater and sediment.

Wu coordinated the visits after meeting firm leaders through the University of Oregon’s Sustainable Cities Initiative. She has since earned her doctorate degree in landscape architecture from the university’s School of Architecture and Allied Arts and is now a post doctorate fellow at Pennsylvania State University, but continues to promote such Chinese-American exchanges.

When the opportunity arose for Wu to participate in an urban stormwater symposium in May at her Chinese alma mater, Tsinghua University in Beijing, she invited Wall to attend. He was joined at the symposium by John Lenth of Herrera Environmental Consultants in Seattle and Bill Wenk of Wenk Associates in Denver.

Wu said she encouraged the reverse exchange because she believes American engineers, landscape architects and urban designers considering environmental work in China should travel there to meet potential Chinese colleagues.

“I felt it was important for them to see the country themselves,” she said. “I believe they have made some really great connections. (I’m) just trying to connect these two places together, and when opportunities come up there will be a lot more interaction.”

Business opportunities abound in China for U.S. engineers, landscape architects and urban planners specializing in stormwater management and brownfield redevelopment, but breaking into the Chinese market can be challenging, Wu said. This includes language and cultural barriers as well as vastly different approaches to urban planning.

“Just trying to localize these things takes a lot of effort,” she said. “The need is definitely there.”

Mostly, Chinese design professionals are hoping to learn from their American counterparts, she said.

“The (U.S.) consulting firms would be in better demand because they would be in an advisor role,” Wu said.

It can be near impossible for U.S. firms to compete in China with the country’s state-owned enterprises, said William Nesmith, a Salem-based senior energy adviser with the National Association of State Energy Officials. He has done work in China since 2000.

“It’s more difficult than you’d think to do business in China,” he said.

Nesmith is involved in an “eco-partnership” between Portland and the Chinese city of Kunming. The U.S. State Department program promotes a best-practices knowledge exchange between American and Chinese professionals.

At this point, the best way for Oregon design professionals to find business opportunities in China is to promote expertise in environmental work, Nesmith said.

“By and large, I’d say consulting services, if you have a reputation, you’ll get work,” he said. “They’ll seek your expertise and pay for it.”

MFA could be one of those advisers in China, Wall said. While there last month, he solidified the firm’s role as a technical consultant to Chinese landscape architecture and urban design firm Urban People + Space.

“We’re basically at their disposal to support project work and team with them in pursuing opportunities,” Wall said.

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Maul Foster & Alongi Inc. has promoted Madi Novak to principal environmental scientist. She joined the firm in 2004 and has since taken on a variety of project management duties. In her new role she will have expanded mentorship and business development responsibilities. She is based in Portland and works on projects throughout the West.

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Tyler Vick believes drawing a map is often the best route to make sense of reams of complex data.

He’s a principal with FLO Analytics, a subsidiary of environmental engineering firm Maul, Foster & Alongi that specializes in data analysis using geographic information system (GIS) technology. The company, which has offices in Portland and Seattle, creates detailed maps illustrating various factors considered by municipalities, school districts, land trusts and private companies seeking sites for future development or conducting land use studies and property inventories, among other uses.

“It very much became a communication tool,” Vick said. “A picture is worth a thousand words resonated with MFA early on.”

MFA leaders started FLO Analytics in 2012 after firm leaders realized the demand for GIS maps that staffers were producing for environmental consulting work could be used more broadly, MFA President Jim Maul said. As the technology continues to evolve, the firm is finding even more applications for the data-derived maps, he said.

“What it does is it allows you to pull in these different elements of the problem and create an output that’s easy to understand,” Maul said. “One of the things people wanted was data-driven decision-making.”

It quickly became apparent that the technology is useful for public and private entities seeking to expand, FLO Analytics principal Steve Taylor said. Distilling a survey of numerous potential sites onto a map based on certain priorities helps clients make informed decisions about purchasing properties for future development, he said.

“At least they know where they need to be looking,” he said.

FLO Analytics staffers have created maps for school districts seeking optimal sites to build a new school using projected enrollment and population growth pattern data. Another application is cataloging ideal properties for grocery stores like New Seasons Market to expand based on neighborhood demographics and proximity of competitors. The firm has also worked with electricity and wastewater management companies that own vast swaths of infrastructure to track maintenance of pipes and power lines as well as analyze where to expand those services in the future.

“So much of that is understanding your assets,” Vick said.

The technology has been particularly useful for school districts to track where students live within boundaries and anticipate surges in enrollment at certain schools based on population growth and development trends in the surrounding neighborhoods, Vick said. In a land use study for Bellingham Public Schools, in Bellingham, Wash., FLO Analytics staffers created a map pinpointing the location of each student household and predicted how that population would shift in 10 years based on residential development patterns in the city and its comprehensive plan. The district used this information to plan where to expand, Vick said.

The firm will do a similar study for the Central Valley School District in Spokane Valley, Wash., which is planning to build a new high school.

FLO Analytics has also worked with the Ridgefield School District, in Southwest Washington, to analyze voter turnout in certain parts of the district after a bond measure failed in 2007. The data helped target outreach to voters living in a portion of the district that extends into Vancouver, Wash., during the campaign for a bond measure that passed in 2012.

“It just painted a very compelling picture, and I think that’s what we’re all about with FLO,” Maul said. “(Out of) all this complexity, the result is something that’s simple to understand.”

Seeing the demographics of the district illustrated was eye-opening for Art Edgerly, a former Ridgefield School District superintendent who advocated for the bond.

“It was a great opportunity to learn about your school district,” he said. “What we were really seeking was some strong data (and) demographics of the regional school district. We needed information. To have that data collected and analyzed was really important.”

The data analysis work by MFA and FLO was also helpful for long-range facilities planning, Edgerly said.

“It was really a way for us to collaborate with them and get a good picture of what the Ridgefield School District would look like in the future, so we could plan accordingly,” he said. “It really provides a road map for the (school) boards and superintendents.”

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Maul Foster & Alongi President Jim Maul has seen what he describes as a paradigm shift in the forces driving brownfield cleanups in the Portland-metro region.

“People began to realize if they were going to go in and cap a site, it could be a parking lot or a building,” he said, “so we started looking at the economics of the cleanup.”

Maul, a co-founder of the Vancouver, Wash.-based environmental engineering and planning firm, said specialization in assessment of redevelopment potential of sites contaminated by past industrial use has paid off. As the economy rebounds and the demand for urban infill grows, firm staffers are seeing an increase in private efforts to clean up and develop brownfield sites.

“We were hearing from a lot of our clients that there was a real demand for land-use planning,” Maul said. “We realized we were a very competent brownfield company … We came at it both from the technical end and the policy side.”

Maul Foster & Alongi’s experience with prominent cleanups like the Zidell Marine Corp. property in the South Waterfront District has led to recent work on brownfield inventories for Metro and the cities of Portland and Beaverton. The goal behind the inventories is to encourage public-private partnerships to clean up and breathe new life into the region’s brownfields, including old mills and former gas stations and auto shops, Maul said.

“Today, the majority of cleanups are driven by market forces,” he said.

Brownfield inventory work involves investigating which contaminated sites have the greatest potential for redevelopment and most community interest. City officials can then reach out to property owners to find out what would be required for cleanup and redevelopment to take place.

“To me, it’s a little bit like a public works project,” Maul said. “Development is the remedy. What are the tools that allow that to occur?”

The process involves a comprehensive look at each site: Professionals analyze the zoning, past and current land use, nearby transportation corridors and sensitive environmental areas like wetlands, said Ted Wall, Maul Foster & Alongi Oregon operations manager and principal engineer.

“You go from hundreds and hundreds of parcels to a few,” he said. “As the number of sites gets to a manageable number, there will be outreach to those property owners to see what is possible – what the city can do.”

One measure to encourage private development on brownfields involves changing the perception that environmental contamination poses a barrier, Wall said. State programs provide funding and low-interest loans to assist planning and cleanup so that sites are restored to productive use.

“The economics of the environmental component are manageable within the economics of the development,” Wall said. “The environmental components are nothing but another line item on the pro forma.”

One project that benefited from state cleanup funding was Ava Roasteria, a downtown Beaverton coffee shop that formerly was a gas station. The project is one reason why Beaverton city officials are undertaking a brownfields inventory, Wall said.

“It’s a good example of a property going from dormant and really a blight to something successful,” he said. “(Beaverton officials are) trying to replicate that.”

Cheyenne Chapman, a legal policy analyst with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, said the stigma surrounding brownfields is starting to dissipate, especially in the wake of the recession. She coordinates the DEQ‘s Prospective Purchaser Agreement program in which the extent of contamination on a brownfield site is assessed and a cleanup plan is created during a change in ownership. Currently, about a dozen projects in Oregon are going through this process, she said.

“We’ve had a steady uptick in the number of inquiries that are coming in and a rise in applications,” she said. “As the economy picks up, it might be (that) reusing these sites in one form or another becomes more attractive.”

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A planning effort to convert 260 acres of Port of Kalama property to accommodate business and recreational uses recently was selected by Washington Gov. Jay Inslee as a 2014 Governor’s Smart Communities Award winner.

The awards program recognizes outstanding efforts throughout Washington by communities and their partners to achieve development objectives.

Environmental engineering and planning firm Maul Foster & Alongi worked with the Port of Kalama and the city of Kalama for more than five years to create a business and recreational park on port property, firm President Jim Maul said. In April, property was annexed into the city to make way for development of the planned Spencer Creek Business Park and the Haydu Park recreational area.

The goal is to create more jobs in a part of the state that has suffered economically since the decline of the timber industry, Maul said.

“This could really be a shot in the arm for that area,” he said.

The business park will hold more than 500,000 square feet in about 70 acres, and support a mix of light industrial, office, commercial and retail uses.

Haydu Park will include 24 acres of fairgrounds, baseball diamonds and soccer fields.

Maul said it was an honor for the project to receive the Smart Communities Award.

“It was an acknowledgement of the persistence and perseverance of the port and the city in making this collaboration happen,” he said.

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