The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality held a public hearing on the plan to clean up Greensboro’s Bingham Park on Tuesday.
The 12-acre site began a century ago as a pre-regulatory landfill in East Greensboro. It was converted to a public park in the 1970s. Now, the community is learning more about how it will be cleaned up.
Greensboro’s Environmental Compliance Support Manager Richard Lovett led an information session before the public hearing. In Phase 1, crews will move contaminated soil from some areas, including the former Hampton School site and nearby creek, to a landfill in Asheboro. The remainder of the area will be excavated, consolidated, and eventually capped and covered with the long-term goal of relocating all contaminated soil to regulated landfills.
That’s a big shift from the city council’s original recommendation in October of 2024, to cap and cover the entire park. At $12 million, that proposal was roughly one-quarter the cost, but it also raised environmental concerns and received pushback from community members.
At-Large City Councilmember Hugh Holston voted against that plan in favor of full remediation. Now he says achieving that goal is a matter of money.
"That's why you're seeing phases — there are going to be up to five phases," he said. "First phase, $17 million. The other phase is somewhere between six and $10 million, depending upon cost and supply chain, all that. That's what gets you up to the $40 to $50 million estimate to do it all. Don't have it all right now, but we do have phases one and two ready to go."
The state, NCDEQ, city and federal government are funding the effort. Holston says it will take local support, commercial and individual, to see it through. The work itself will run from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. and involve up to 50 trucks a day with access to residential streets.
Some community members called for more opportunities to weigh in on the plan and assurances that all toxic waste would eventually be removed. They asked that the Remedial Action Plan include more safeguards to protect health and the environment during and after cleanup. And many in attendance expressed frustration over the timeline, including former Greensboro Mayor Keith Holliday.
"I live right beside one of the nicer parks in Greensboro — Bicentennial Gardens," he said. "If this issue had occurred there in western Greensboro area, there would be no doubt as to what the result would have been years ago, to clean it up instead of encapsulating it and walking away from it."
The bid packages for contractors are currently being revised and should be approved by the city council in August. Surveying is slated to begin in the fall, with Phase 1 to be completed by the spring of 2028.