Communities across the Great Lakes are struggling to make use of massive properties that are too polluted to sell and too costly to clean.

“Perfect waste.” That’s how Bryan Messmore describes the 733-acre parcel of land at the confluence of Tanners Creek and the Ohio River.

Messmore is the city coordinator and redevelopment director for Lawrenceburg, Indiana, a town of 5,000 people in the southeast corner of the state that in 2020 appeared on the verge of a renaissance. Indiana’s port authority had designated the property by Tanners Creek as the future site of the state’s fourth port, a potential game-changer for Lawrenceburg’s economy.

Four years later, there is no port. There are no ships or construction vehicles. Instead, there is a mostly empty dirt patch, dotted with murky pools and earthen berms.

An environmental survey commissioned by Ports of Indiana found that toxic substances—including arsenic, boron, and lead—had leeched as much as 40 feet below the surface, contaminating the soil and the groundwater. A terse statement from the port authority concluded, “Remediation work would take years to complete on a significant portion of the land, rendering the site economically unviable as a port facility at this time.”

The toxic chemicals beneath the site were the result of six decades of coal combustion and waste. From 1951 through 2015, the 1,100-megawatt Tanners Creek Power Plant chugged away on the north bank of the Ohio River, providing not just electricity but also jobs and $1.9 million in annual property taxes to the community.

But in 2007, a sweeping legal settlement forced the power plant’s owner, American Electric Power (AEP), to permanently close the plant. On May 31, 2015, the plant’s final generating unit shut down for good.

By November of 2016, AEP had vacated the site, transferring ownership to a company called Tanners Creek Development, LLC. In 2017, Ports of Indiana conditionally selected the site for a new port. The following year, a planned demolition brought the old smokestacks crashing down. “Between the plant closing and the discussion about a port, there was some optimism that the property was going to be redeveloped,” Messmore recalled.

That optimism has long since fizzled. Since the demise of the port plan four years ago, Messmore has heard no concrete proposals to redevelop the site. Nor does he have any contact with the property owner. “We’re unable to get site visits or any real inquiries because of the conditions of the soils and access challenges,” he said.

It’s unclear to whom these inquiries might even be directed. While Tanners Creek Development owns the site, another company called Environmental Liability Transfer has assumed the liability for the property. A third company called EnviroAnalytics Group oversees remediation, while Industrial Demolition takes down the structures and Industrial Asset Recovery sells the valuable materials removed from them. Only three of these companies have functioning websites. Three did not yet exist when AEP announced that Tanners Creek would be closing. But they all share an address in St. Louis and a parent company called Commercial Development Company (CDC), which purports to be the United States’ largest buyer of contaminated former industrial sites.

On its website, CDC boasts of “robust reclamation efforts” at the Tanners Creek site, saying, “Today the property represents a rare opportunity for an industrial user to take advantage of the site’s outstanding development attributes.”

Tim Maloney doesn’t quite see it that way. He’s the former senior policy director for the Hoosier Environmental Council (HEC), an environmental advocacy group active throughout Indiana. “The site still has a lot of contamination issues,” he said. In 2023, the HEC sued the state’s environmental regulator, arguing that CDC’s remediation plan “allows pollutants to contaminate ground and surface water.” The suit was ultimately dismissed. CDC declined to comment on its involvement with Tanners Creek.

Messmore admits to being frustrated at CDC’s lack of urgency and transparency. “There’s a lot of property sitting over there that’s worthless,” he said. Powerless to accelerate redevelopment, he has dim hopes for the site’s future. “We’re looking through the fence, both figuratively and literally.”

Lawrenceburg is far from alone. In the past decade, the U.S. has retired 40 percent of its coal fleet. Those retirements mean the plants are no longer emitting greenhouse gases, but they have also left nearby communities reeling at the loss of jobs and revenue. They also present an opportunity for economic rebirth. Particularly in Great Lakes states, which have historically relied heavily on coal power, retired coal plants often sit on valuable waterfront property—property that could support new, more sustainable forms of economic activity. Decades of coal consumption and disposal, however, often leave these sites too contaminated to safely develop. Absent proper remediation, they remain vacant and unproductive—and potentially dangerous to the people and ecosystems nearby.

A Solar Solution Across the Border

Matt Jamieson remembers what it was like to live near the Nanticoke Coal Power Plant. “The wind pattern at Nanticoke was such that all of the emissions cascaded over our community for all those years,” he recalls. Jamieson is the president and CEO of the Six Nations of Grand River Development Corporation (SNGRDC), the investment vehicle for the most populous First Nations reserve in Canada, a community of 12,000 people located 50 miles west of Niagara Falls.

Every day for half a century, residents of Six Nations would drive 30 minutes to a site on the north shore of Lake Erie, where they would join 900 to 1,000 other workers to operate the largest coal-fired power plant in North America. Nanticoke Generating Station was an eight-unit behemoth with a nameplate capacity of nearly 4,000 MW. In 2010, it comprised over 11 percent of Ontario’s entire generating capacity.

Nanticoke was one of four power plants to close on Dec. 31, 2013, following a decision by the provincial government of Ontario to ban coal combustion. That decision came as little surprise to the plant’s operator, Ontario Power Generation (OPG). “We knew in the early 2000s we’d be closing the plant down at some point,” said Neal Kelly, OPG’s director of media. “So we opened up conversations with local leaders and employees.”

The most consequential of those conversations occurred in 2016, when OPG approached the newly incorporated SNGRDC about building a solar farm on the property. “It made economic sense and common sense to put renewable energy there,” Jamieson remembers thinking. “You’ve got this transmission asset that’s sitting there and doing nothing.”

It made sense to Marie Trainer, too. She was the mayor of Haldimand County, where Nanticoke was located, from 2003 to 2010 and currently serves on the county council. Trainer says it was a shame that the coal plant had to be shuttered, but that the site was a “perfect spot” for a solar plant. “The capacity is there,” she said. “You don’t have to buy up a new [transmission] corridor or go through anybody’s yard.”

After a community consultation, SNGRDC agreed to take a 15 percent stake in what would be a CA$100 million ($73 million) project. Within three years, the entire power plant had been demolished and the site had been remediated enough to build a new industrial facility. On May 29, 2019, OPG brought online 200,000 individual solar panels, less than five and a half years since the site last burned coal.

Kelly acknowledges that the solar power plant is not a complete replacement for what was lost. “It doesn’t have the same amount of jobs,” he conceded. Nor, at a nameplate capacity of 44 MW, does it generate anywhere close to the amount of power its predecessor did. But he takes pride in the way the process was conducted. “We treated everyone with respect and generosity, and that went a long way,” he said.

Jamieson is likewise pleased with the outcome. “We’re certainly moving the needle on carbon reduction,” he said. “This is an example of what’s possible when corporations or governments collaborate with Indigenous communities.”

Kelly and Jamieson both see the project as a powerful demonstration of the opportunity presented by former coal plant sites. As renewable energy projects face more siting challenges, retired coal plants offer pre-disturbed land that comes with a substation, a transmission connection, a water supply and a nearby community eager to replace the lost jobs. “And you know what?” said Jamieson, “What a great story, to take what was the worst-emitting coal plant in North America and to turn it into something that is clean and green and renewable.”

Value Judgements

A tax court hearing had already been scheduled by the time the Zimmer Power Plant closed—and the local government stood to lose millions.

It was salt in the wound for Washington Township, a community of 2,200 on the southern edge of Ohio. The 1,426 MW coal-fired generator had been a vital cog in the local economy for three decades. In 2020, it provided roughly 15 percent of the local school district’s revenue and employed the equivalent of one in every 15 people in the township. So community leaders were already bracing for impact when Texas-based Vistra Energy announced that it would shutter the plant in mid-2022, five years earlier than initially planned.

Then the legal proceedings began. Vistra, which had been steadily reducing the value of the Zimmer property since 2015 as utilization declined, appealed its land valuation to the Ohio State Board of Tax Appeals. It argued that because the plant had closed, the property, which the Clermont County Auditor valued at $140 million, was only worth $28.5 million.

Local authorities decided to settle the case before it went to court. In a closed-door meeting, representatives for the school district and the county board of revision agreed to drop the site’s assessed value to $52 million in 2022, with the potential for a further reduction the following year. The devaluation would force local schools, libraries and governments to pay back tens of thousands of dollars worth of property taxes that they had collected from Vistra.

Dennis Cooper, one of three trustees elected to govern Washington Township, expects that the township will ultimately lose $70,000 in the devaluation. But he is baffled at Vistra’s persistence, particularly on the heels of its extravagant purchase of several nuclear power plants last year. “If you’re being a good neighbor and you can spend $3.4 billion on nukes, what is $70,000 to you?” asks Cooper. “It means everything to us and it must be beans to them.”

All the while, he said, the property continues to sit idle. “Common sense tells you if you have a property and you’re not doing anything with it, you’d either sell it or develop it,” he said. So far, Vistra has done neither.

If any redevelopment were occurring, Jim Suter would know. He’s the mayor of Moscow, a 156-person village within Washington Township that directly abuts Zimmer on the shore of the Ohio River. The plant’s massive cooling towers loom over the village, visible from nearly every street.

Suter hopes to see the land returned to productive use. “We’d like to see redevelopment somewhat quickly,” he said. Ideally, “something that will produce revenue and be a good neighbor for the village.”

But he doesn’t know what that redevelopment might look like, or when it will occur. Vistra indicated in a press release that it would evaluate the site’s suitability for renewable energy or storage installations, but, said Suter, “We can’t really get a definitive answer from them about what their plans are.”

Nor does Vistra seem eager to turn over the land to another developer. While several companies approached Suter for information about the property, Suter has seen no evidence that Vistra reached out to any of them. Vistra’s representatives have assured local officials that they are open to selling, but Suter is skeptical. “My personal opinion? I don’t think it was for sale. I think that was just a ploy.” Vistra did not respond to a request for comment.

For both Suter and Cooper, the two years since Zimmer’s retirement have been a frustrating exercise in opacity. Shut out from discussions about valuation, redevelopment, and property transfer, both men have largely resigned themselves to adapting their communities to a post-Zimmer reality.

Asked what he wants from Vistra, Cooper is firm: “No more backroom deals. No more.”

Sale or Seizure

In 2016, while AEP was seeking a buyer for Tanners Creek and OPG was kicking off its discussions with Six Nations, a coal plant in Tonawanda, New York, was belching its last steam clouds.

The C. R. Huntley Generating Plant had occupied the eastern bank of the Niagara River for a century when it closed on March 1, 2016, and community members were prepared when the day finally arrived. As far back as 2013, a coalition of government officials, union leaders, environmental advocates and school board members had been exploring options to blunt the economic impact of the closure. By 2016, the group, informally called the “Huntley Alliance,” had secured a first-of-its-kind stopgap fund from the state that would, in its first year, cover 80 percent of the tax revenue lost to Huntley’s closure. And by July of that year, they had secured a $160,000 grant from the federal government to build out a community-oriented redevelopment plan.

Joseph Emminger, Tonawanda’s town supervisor, remembers the enthusiasm of that year. Hopes were high that Huntley’s retirement could inaugurate a new chapter in the town’s economy by opening up a valuable waterfront property for redevelopment. “That is a generational property,” said Emminger. “This is something that comes along maybe once every hundred years in our municipality.” A quick procession of sale, remediation and redevelopment, he hoped, could provide the town new opportunities and new sources of tax revenue.

But the power plant’s owner, Houston-based NRG Energy, evinced no such urgency. By September 2018, with little remediation completed and no buyer yet identified, the Town of Tonawanda tried to take control of the property through eminent domain. Before a court could decide on the case, NRG announced it had found a buyer, New York-based WarrenBrook Redevelopment, LLC. Town officials, in a show of good faith, dropped the suit.

But in June 2020, with a purchase agreement signed and due diligence underway, NRG announced that the sale had been suspended.

Michael Edman was one of three partners at WarrenBrook, which has since dissolved. He says that the deal collapsed “for a variety of reasons,” including the economic uncertainties of the COVID-19 pandemic. But the decision to suspend the sale was mutual, he said. “It was nothing nefarious.”

For Emminger and the Tonawanda community, the deal’s suspension meant an ambitious redevelopment agenda was once again on hold. Perceiving little progress on NRG’s part toward finding a buyer, the town revived its eminent domain case against the property.

This time, the case went to trial. And Tonawanda won. The New York State Appellate Division ruled against NRG, saying the town’s seizure of the property would “serve the public use.” Two appeals to the New York Supreme Court also went Tonawanda’s way, with justices dismissing the case in December 2023 and again in March 2024. Town officials now say they expect to identify a buyer in the next 30 to 40 days. In a statement, NRG said it was “disappointed with the court’s ruling” and that it “continues to evaluate options regarding the future of the site.”

For Emminger, the satisfaction of a favorable ruling is tinged with frustration over what he sees as eight wasted years. “We’ve done everything that NRG has asked us to do,” he said. “They have done very little [remediation] other than the bare minimum that is required … They’re just delaying and delaying and delaying.”

He thinks he knows why. For years, NRG has leased out access to its water intake on the Niagara River, providing local manufacturers with untreated water at a fraction of the price they would pay to the local utility. “They would sit on that site for the next 30 years if they could, just making money,” Emminger said.

Edman concedes that the revenue from the water supply is likely lucrative. But he thinks there is another reason why NRG might be holding onto the site: environmental liability. “Nobody’s paying a lot of money for these properties, so there’s no financial incentive to sell,” he said. “If it creates financial liability for a seller, it oftentimes must be easier for them to just sit there and do nothing with it.”

In fact, it’s this single challenge, Edman thinks, that is keeping retired coal plants fallow across the country.

Liability Hot Potato

New York, Ohio and Indiana have collectively retired 47 coal plants in the past two decades. Of these, only 11 have been successfully redeveloped—converted mostly into gas-fired power plants, but also into data centers and cryptocurrency mining operations.

And the Great Lakes region is far from an outlier. Across the United States, retired coal plants sit vacant and rusting, with little to no chance of revival. They are, in many cases, the picture of neglect: abandoned lots with murky ash ponds and dirt berms, visible to locals only through barbed wire fences. In some cases, the deserted structures have been known to catch fire or unexpectedly collapse.

Yet they also occupy some of the country’s most valuable plots of land—large, contiguous parcels abutting major waterways, often within walking distance of a population center. These qualities make them attractive locations for parks, industrial centers, or, as in the case of Nanticoke, clean energy hubs. Why, then, are they so rarely redeveloped?

The answer to that question involves shadowy companies, secret agreements, and false promises—but it begins 40 feet below the Tanners Creek ash ponds. Before any redevelopment can occur, the site must be purged of the harmful toxins such as arsenic, boron and radium that decades of burning and dumping coal allowed to leach into the soil. All told, decommissioning and remediating a retired coal plant can cost anywhere from $3.5 million to $200 million. What’s more, thanks to a 1980 federal environmental law, a botched remediation job can trigger lawsuits against the original polluter, even if they no longer own the property.

Former coal plant sites, then, are not so much attractive assets as they are a monkey on the back of power plant operators desperate to offload them.

Dave Altman is the president of Cincinnati-based environmental law firm AltmanNewman. In his five decades of litigating remediation cases, he has witnessed the creative tactics companies employ to jettison contaminated sites. Initially, he says, “the dream of any polluting company was to turn over their contaminated property as a gift to the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, or a church.” That way, when the full scope of contamination was discovered, elected officials would opt to clean it up with state funds rather than sue the “mom-and-pop nonprofit” that had unwittingly agreed to assume ownership of the site. Altman says people eventually caught on to this tactic; he himself warned Xavier University against accepting an exploded chemical plant as a gift in 2000.

With few willing recipients and no desire to maintain the properties, power plant operators now pay millions to offload the sites and, in doing so, unburden themselves of the environmental liability. That has spawned what Altman calls “an entire industry for taking the liability off the books.” Around the country, companies purporting to specialize in brownfield redevelopment have sprung into existence. These companies, Altman said, sign “secret deals” with power plant operators to take over their contaminated properties and associated liabilities.

A closer look at these companies raises more questions than answers. Take the example of Tanners Creek. The property’s official owner, Tanners Creek Development LLC, was incorporated only seven months before assuming control of the site and seems to have no other assets. Altman said this structure is by design. “They set up a separate, small limited liability organization to take hundreds of millions in liability,” he said. Under this structure, the parent company can reap the profits of the land transfer while the small pockets of its subsidiary limit the amount it might have to pay out in the event of a lawsuit, effectively shielding the parent company from responsibility. As an added benefit, he said, “it makes it appear that they’re different companies to regulators who are asleep at the switch.”

Land transfers are often followed by vague statements about redevelopment. But the redevelopment companies’ economic incentives point in a different direction. “They get paid millions of dollars to do the minimum they can do to get out,” Altman said. “If you resolve your uncertainty with a phony cleanup, nobody is going to touch the property. Everybody knows it, but the utility has got it off its books.” In other words, having cashed in on the liability transfer, the new owners would prefer to perform “cosmetic cleanup” than to take on the substantial remediation costs involved in developing.

Michael Edman saw this industry from the inside. And he thinks it is making it harder for well-intentioned redevelopers to succeed. “There have been a lot of bad actors over the years who have bought these sites and have not fulfilled their obligations or made the problem worse,” he said. “They’d go in and strip out all the valuable metal and disappear.” (It is worth noting that one of Commercial Development Company’s subsidiaries, Industrial Asset Recovery, seems to perform exactly this function.)

That has left power plant operators skittish at the prospect of transferring properties to ill-intentioned or ill-prepared owners. “The seller’s concern is that if whoever they sell it to can’t handle whatever cleanup is ahead of them, [the liability] is going to come back to the original seller,” said Edman. “The seller is trying to transfer as much liability as they can, and the buyer is trying to limit as much liability as they can. Those two forces are completely opposite one another.” Many operators are therefore content to do nothing with the site. Suing to reduce the tax burden—as Vistra did in Ohio—further reduces the downside of keeping the property, and site-specific benefits like Huntley’s water intake can provide additional upside.

“For a lot of these companies,” Edman concluded, “Their smartest path is just to lock it and leave it.”

Whether the site changes hands, as in the case of Tanners Creek, or remains with the power plant operator, as with Zimmer and Huntley, the result is often the same. Site owners will mollify nearby communities with abstract redevelopment plans despite having no incentive to enact them. In the meantime, the power plant property remains idle—too polluted to sell and too costly to clean.

That reality is likely to leave many American towns in limbo. One hundred thirty-eight coal generators are slated for retirement by 2030. Each retirement will see jobs lost and revenue erased, and a community eager to reclaim the land. But unless incentives change, most will face dim prospects for redevelopment.

If there is one thing that could rescue these communities from limbo, said Altman, it is transparency. It is a sentiment shared by Messmore, Maloney, Cooper, Suter, and Emminger. “Get these secret agreements that the utilities have with these liability companies and to look at what they say,” Altman explained. “That’s the one thing that would blow the lid off the charade.”

Until that is achieved, he worries that the power plant sites will mirror the industry that surrounds them: hazardous, deceptive and hidden from public view.