State regulators and water officials have expressed concerns that the pollution plume left behind by Whittaker-Bermite is expanding within the local water table, as city officials consider a plan to build thousands of homes nearby.
The agenda for the Santa Clarita City Council meeting Tuesday includes the possible approval of a 10-year contract for monitoring wells on city property.
The contract is between EHS Solutions and Whittaker Corp., which formerly owned the property.
The city land is near the Whittaker-Bermite property, which was polluted by toxic waste for decades by the previous owners’ munitions manufacturing operations before the soil was cleaned up and eyed for more than 6,500 homes by developer New Urban West and renamed “Sunridge.”
The new plan calls for 3,000 more homes than originally proposed for the site, while at the same time reducing the new road connections that would be built.
Along with homes, the property, south of Soledad Canyon Road, east of Railroad Avenue and west of Golden Valley Road, is proposed to include: a championship youth sports facility on adjacent city property; a community/cultural center on the adjacent city property; and open space dedications, including new trails, according to previous discussion.
Next to the property, the city is expected to give permission so an environmental consultant working on the Whittaker land, EHS Solutions LLC, has access to install the monitoring wells, according to Kevin Strauss, spokesman for the Santa Clarita Valley Water Agency.
He said Friday in a phone interview that SCV Water is not involved in the contract. However, the agency has a heavily vested interest in the local monitoring wells.
In January, Steve Cole, the assistant general manager of SCV Water, requested a “comprehensive sampling event” due to tests that showed unsafe levels of multiple contaminants associated with munitions production.
State records of the Whittaker site indicate there are lingering concerns about a pollution plume on the property that could continue to expand if not properly treated.
“Contamination from the site continues to flow off-site, contaminating SCV Water’s drinking water wells,” Cole wrote in December. “In its approval of this report, DTSC is explicitly agreeing to contamination remaining on-site in deep soils and in perched groundwater without being contained.”
Amber Rodriguez, who works in the city’s Neighborhood Services Department and prepared the agenda report for the wells, did not respond to an email Friday requesting the monitoring-wells contract. City Communications Manager Carrie Lujan responded to a request for the public record of the contract to say it would be made available Monday.
From 1934 to 1987, the Whittaker-Bermite Corp. built and tested everything from fireworks to military-grade weapons on a nearly 1,000-acre site, which was known to local residents for decades as the toxic doughnut hole due to its central location and contaminated status.
In 2019, officials said a yearslong cleanup of the soil was done, and in February 2021, the Department of Toxic Substances Control released its $1.4 million hold on the property.
The move created a path for development and created one of the larger, more easily accessible, undeveloped parcels left in L.A. County — albeit one with a lingering question. Specifically: What will it take to make the production from the area’s water table safe for residents?
In July 2022, SCV Water announced a $65.9 million judgment for the cleanup of local groundwater contamination from the Whittaker-Bermite site, which Whittaker challenged but a federal appellate court later upheld.
About four months later, the DTSC issued an imminent and substantial endangerment determination and order for Whittaker because “releases of perchlorate at the site have impacted the underlying groundwater, causing contaminated groundwater to migrate.”
The following year, on Aug. 31, 2023, DTSC asked for annual monitoring reports from SCV Water on off-site groundwater contamination at Whittaker-Bermite to help in its oversight.
The first report in February 2024 for the previous year indicates both the state and the water agency said the extent of the property’s contamination into the local water table “has not been fully delineated by the current monitoring well network.”
Correspondence among state regulators, SCV Water and the consultants currently working on the site for Whittaker reflect months of requests from SCV Water, DTSC reports and then a Dec. 20, 2024, agreement by EHS Support LLC, which is the company identified as the well-builder in the City Council agenda item for Tuesday.
Local water officials have spent years and millions of dollars removing contamination, with Strauss once estimating the price tag at more than $200 million, with $15 million in annual costs.
The annual report for 2023 discusses SCV Water’s Alluvial and Saugus formations:
“The full downgradient extent and distribution of perchlorate in the Alluvial Aquifer remains unknown, as indicated by the presence of perchlorate in almost all offsite alluvial monitoring wells,” according to the executive summary. “Water quality data indicate that perchlorate and volatile organic compounds remain present throughout the Saugus Formation at the Parker site and at downgradient offsite locations.”
On March 6, 2024, New Urban West, which now controls the Whittaker-Bermite property, pitched a plan in a meeting with the city that sought a commitment for what would be allowable for construction on Sunridge.
On Sept. 10, about six months after the meeting at City Hall, the Santa Clarita City Council agreed to New Urban West’s request for a memorandum of understanding on its plans for homes, commercial uses, open space and more homes. The plans call for more than 3,000 more homes than the original proposal for the property, and the developer was asked to do a traffic study to justify why it was proposing fewer road improvements than the original proposed master plan, only connecting two of the three routes initially proposed.
On Sept. 24, the state’s DTSC sent a letter about its monitoring of off-site contamination stemming from the Whittaker-Bermite property.
Jason Crawford, community development manager for the city of Santa Clarita, said the city received a project application for the Sunridge development in December, which was deemed incomplete by city staff.
John Musella, a spokesman for New Urban West, said the plans for the project are still being worked on and the developer is planning to resubmit “later this year.”
A copy of that application was requested Friday by The Signal but also not released.
City staff is in the process of reviewing what was provided in the Sunridge application, Crawford said, and letting the developer know about what additional information is needed.
When contacted Friday, DTSC officials said its Whittaker-Bermite web page, which appears to have been taken down in September 2024, was having problems due to the agency’s site maintenance.
A current list of actions on the site can be found here: bit.ly/4iOJFdj.
