Lesson of Millview is learned decades later

By CRAIG PITTMAN, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published April 21, 2002

Florida's Great Northwest Development vs. environment leads to give-and-take meeting

St. Joe Co. has tried its hand at development before. The buyers did not fare well.

For years St. Joe's paper mill dumped its waste -- pine bark and potentially hazardous boiler ash -- in a swampy area across the railroad tracks from downtown Port St. Joe.

In the 1950s, St. Joe filled in the swamp, subdivided the land, named it Millview and sold it to black home buyers.

By the late 1990s gravity caught up with Millview and the waste foundation settled. Some of the houses are sinking and cracking. Now Florida's Department of Health and Department of Environmental Protection are investigating whether the waste is making people sick.

Lawyer Steve Andrews from Tallahassee filed a lawsuit for 26 Millview residents that said St. Joe dumped arsenic, chromium and other hazardous chemicals. His firm uncovered documents indicating that in 1990 St. Joe executives told a contractor to hide the potential source of contamination from state regulators.

[Times photo: Douglas Clifford] Traykel Boykins, 3, plays near his home off Avenue D in Port St. Joe, the now-defunct paper mill looming in the background.

Investigators fear St. Joe may have contaminated more than Millview's soil. For decades the city's wastewater treatment plant took in mill waste and dumped the treated effluent into a canal that ran through Millview and into St. Joseph Bay.

The investigation has unsettled longtime residents used to snagging their dinner from the canal.

"People would catch fish and crabs in there and eat them," said Amos Pittman, a 58-year-old Millview resident who worked for St. Joe for 31 years. "Now the scientists are testing the water and we aren't supposed to eat the fish and crabs."

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considered adding the mill to its list of Superfund sites, which would have meant federal funding would pay to clean it up. But top DEP officials convinced the EPA to let St. Joe and the mill's new owner, Smurfit-Stone Container Corp., handle the investigation and cleanup instead, to clear the way for the mill's demolition this spring.

A Superfund designation would "have an adverse effect on redevelopment" of the mill site, DEP's then-deputy secretary, Kirby Green, wrote to the EPA last year.

The DEP has never before or since done such a favor for a Florida company, according to DEP Secretary David Struhs. Given St. Joe's history of concealing contamination, why would the DEP trust it to do the job?

Struhs said he was "sympathetic" to St. Joe's wish to keep the contaminated property off the Superfund list "because at the root of it was the issue of stigma. Potentially it could have a real economic impact on the community."

St. Joe chairman Peter Rummell said his company is determined to do right about pollution his predecessors might have left behind: "If something is contaminated we'll fix it."

-- Times staff writer Julie Hauserman contributed to this report.

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