COUNCIL OKS BUILDING ROAD ACROSS BERMITE SITE.

Byline: Patricia Farrell Aidem Daily News Staff Writer

The city will allow a new highway to cross a corner of the contaminated Bermite property and might consider permitting development as sections of the former munitions plant are cleaned.

In a unanimous vote Tuesday night, the Santa Clarita City Council approved construction of Golden Valley Road across an eastern corner of the property, a road viewed as key to the valley's traffic circulation and one that would serve the planned Golden Valley High School.

In a related issue, the council voted 4-1 to consider softening a previous demand that the entire 1,000-acre property be certified clean by the state Department of Toxic Substances Control before any residential development is allowed.

Council members indicated they might allow phased development to help landowner Santa Clarita LLC, a partnership of Arizona-based Remediation Financial Inc., raise money to hasten the cleanup - if the state agrees.

Remediation Financial bought the property last year and took over existing plans for a 3,000-home development on the land called Porta Bella. Once certified clean, the land would be sold to builders.

``They want that site cleaned up,'' city spokeswoman Gail Ortiz said. ``That's the City Council's main concern, how to get this land cleaned up so it's not a health and safety concern for the community.''

Councilwoman Laurene Weste cast the sole dissenting vote.

Weste said Wednesday she is not satisfied the city has enough information from the state about the extent of toxics on the property. She also is concerned that children in new Porta Bella neighborhoods could be endangered by the remnants of a century of heavy manufacturing on the land.

``If we were talking about commercial, business, industrial development, some place where little kids don't play, that would be different,'' Weste said. ``But kids dig, they climb fences, they build forts.

``I'm not telling you the site can't be cleaned. I'm saying building is an entirely different thing.''

The city is looking to Remediation Financial as the answer to a serious problem: cleaning up a site that sits at the center of town, one blamed for a chemical in rocket fuel that has been found in the local ground water. Ortiz said the city wants to act quickly before the perchlorate spreads. Santa Clarita Water Co. has already capped two wells after the chemical was detected in the water.

And the William S. Hart Union High School District is involved because the city's fifth high school is planned on neighboring property, with access through the Bermite land.

The Hart District is facing a deadline for state funding and needs confirmation that the road will be built. To accommodate the road alignment, that portion of the cleanup could be certified by the summer, Mayor Jo Anne Darcy said.

Weste said she agreed the road should be permitted, but questioned building homes in an area state reports say is laden with scores of different kinds of chemicals, buried over decades in the dirt.

``I don't have a higher concern in my life than children,'' she said. ``If you thought the Titanic was sinking and you wouldn't put your family on the ship, would you see the tickets to another family?''