Hart-Miller Island will not receive new dredged material from the Patapsco River after a reversal from Tradepoint Atlantic.

Tradepoint still plans to dredge about 4.2 million cubic yards of river bottom to create its new container ship terminal at Coke Point in Baltimore County. But that material will go elsewhere after significant pushback from the community to placing the material on Hart-Miller Island, said Aaron Tomarchio, Tradepoint’s executive vice president of corporate affairs.

“We’ve always been a community-centered company,” Tomarchio said. “When we took over the former steel mill, we were left with a community that was reeling from the loss of the steel mill. Since that point, we’ve always brought the community in as part of our decision making.”

“When the community was expressing a sentiment,” he said, “we listened.”

Thursday, some in the community were grateful to hear that Hart-Miller, part of which is now a popular state park, would be left undisturbed. But others felt disappointed by the loss of a $40 million payment that Tradepoint had promised to the island and waterfront communities in exchange.

Initially, Tradepoint officials estimated that dumping dredged sediments from the waters off Coke Point onto the north cell of Hart-Miller Island, a former dredge containment area shuttered in 2009, would speed up the terminal project by about two years, allowing it to open in 2026 rather than 2028. But further research revealed that even with the Hart-Miller placement, the terminal likely wouldn’t be able to open until the fall of 2027.

“As we kind of peeled the onion back a little bit on Hart-Miller, it was revealed that it would take a little bit more time than we thought to get the north cell to a point where it could receive more material,” Tomarchio said.

Tradepoint now plans to place the material in a combination of different places, Tomarchio said. That includes the Norfolk Ocean Disposal Site, which is located in the Atlantic Ocean 17 miles east of Virginia’s Cape Henry. Last week, Tradepoint released sampling results indicating that 1.57 million cubic yards of dredged material could be stored there.

About 1.25 million cubic yards could go in existing dredge containment facilities at Masonville Cove or Cox Creek, thanks to a commitment from the Maryland Port Administration, which runs those facilities, Tomarchio said.

The remainder could be dumped on the Tradepoint Atlantic site at two different locations, Tomarchio said. That includes an impoundment, just north of Interstate 695, which currently takes in treated wastewater from the Back River Wastewater Treatment Plant, but may not in the future. The other option is for Tradepoint to construct a dike at the site of an old coal pier on the west side of Coke Point, and dump the material there, Tomarchio said.

Placing all of the dredged material at Hart-Miller certainly would have been more efficient, Tomarchio said. But after community input, he said, the company is pulling back, and aiming to open the terminal in 2028, continuing its redevelopment of the former Bethlehem Steel site.

“Now, we have to permit multiple different locations to place material rather than one. So you know, it would have streamlined the project’s timeline a little better,” Tomarchio said. “But unfortunately, that’s not an option any further.”

For Frank Neighoff, a resident of the Millers Island neighborhood on the mainland in Baltimore County, Tradepoint’s reversal was welcome news. It followed a pivotal community meeting earlier this week, in which a large number of residents expressed dissatisfaction with the project, Neighoff said.

Neighoff said he felt concerned about the potential for the dredged material to leak out into the bay: What if heavy storms overwhelmed the containment area at Hart-Miller, sending industrial contaminants over the dike wall and into the waterway? What if one of the barges carrying the sediments to Hart-Miller ran aground, and spilled the material?

Neighoff said that the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in March is a reminder to prepare for the unexpected, and anticipate disaster before it happens. He believes Tradepoint’s alternative plan is less risky.

“Why do we want to take that type of a risk, when they have other alternatives on their site, or on the ocean?” said Neighoff, who is president of the Chesapeake Bay Association, a nonprofit based in Sparrows Point formed to support communities along the bay.

Neighoff served on the steering committee, formed by Baltimore County, that was to decide on the “community benefit agreement” that would come along with placing sediment at Hart-Miller, including the dollar amount that Tradepoint would pay to compensate the community. Following Thursday’s news, the group was disbanded.

In a statement Thursday, Baltimore County executive Johnny Olszewski Jr. said he was “proud to have convened diverse leaders for a robust, thoughtful, and community-driven process,” but unhappy with the result.

“I am disappointed the effort will not continue and believe this is a missed opportunity to have done something transformative,” Olszewski wrote.

About half of the $40 million pledged by Tradepoint would have gone directly to Hart-Miller Island, to make improvements on the island and transform the north cell into state park land after the dredged material was placed, said Paul Brylske, who served as chairman of the county’s steering committee. The other half would have gone to waterfront communities close to Hart-Miller.

“One of my frustrations is: We’re back to square one,” said Brylske, the president of the Friends of Hart-Miller Island. “It’s likely that north cell will never be a state park, because I don’t think the state can come up with the money to do that.”

Brylske said he was frustrated to find that misinformation about the dredged material seemed to be at the heart of some community members’ concerns.

“They were saying they were going to dump toxic waste in a state park. The material is not toxic,” Brylske said. “There’s a level of measuring of the contamination, and if it reaches the definition of toxic, it has to go somewhere else.”

The quick timeline needed for the community’s decision may have played a role in a knee-jerk reaction, Brylske said. Under General Assembly legislation passed this year, the steering committee had until the end of this year to come up with the community benefit agreement.

But Brylske said he felt confident that state oversight of the project would prevent any contamination from the dredged material.

“If I felt that it was a risk, there is no amount of money we would have accepted,” Brylske said.

Have a news tip? Contact Christine Condon at chcondon@baltsun.com, 667-256-6883 and @CChristine19 on X.