PROVIDENCE — Rhode Island’s capital city took a bold step earlier this month when members of the City Council voted to add a new amendment to the city’s comprehensive plan banning new gas stations.

Under the proposed amendment, the city would lay the groundwork to ban new gas stations within city limits going forward, unless the development “contains significant EV charging station expansion” and acquires a special use permit.

Councilman John Goncalves, the main sponsor of the amendment, told ecoRI News it was a good opportunity for Providence to lead by example and execute the goals of the city’s climate justice plan.

“We’ve been pretty clear about this as a municipality,” said Goncalves. “We clearly have a climate crisis, and this is something that will mitigate that. As we think about alternative energies of the future, we have to be thinking about where we’re going.”

The City Council’s Ordinance Committee on Monday night tweaked the proposed amendment to allow new gas stations to be built only on land that has been declared unsuitable for housing. The amendment was adjusted to avoid a threat by Mayor Brett Smiley to veto the entire comprehensive plan because of “last minute” changes, including the ban on new gas stations.

Providence is undergoing its once-in-a-decade update of its plan, which outlines the city’s goals for land-use and development over the next 10 years. Goncalves said if the prohibition went into effect, Providence would be the first city in the state — and one of the first cities on the East Coast — to implement such a ban.

A number of towns in northern California have succeeded in passing prohibitions on new gas stations, an act Goncalves said it’s time to bring to the Northeast.

“This is us taking a stand and saying we want to get our carbon neutrality goals,” said Goncalves. “In order to do that we need to do our part, and this is us doing our part and taking climate action.”

Although the proposed ban targeted new gas stations, what happens to an existing gas station when it closes? Converting a gas station into something else is a far trickier knot to unravel.

On the state and federal level, gas stations fall under the Environmental Protection Agency’s Underground Storage Tank (UST) program. That program collects data and monitors information on any underground storage tank storing petroleum or hazardous substances underground, such as gasoline in gas stations. In Rhode Island, oversight is handled by a state program housed in the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (DEM).

UST program supervisor Kevin Gillen said there’s no state requirements for decommissioning a gas station and turning it into a new development, but gas station owners – and property owners of any site with underground storage tanks – are on the hook for environmental monitoring of the soil in case of leaks in the present or the past.

“They’re required to have an environmental consultant on site,” explained Gillen. “Their job is to screen soils. They have an instrument and they go out and get soil readings, and any contaminated soils are supposed to get segregated, stockpiled and removed offsite later on.”

Contaminated soil is excavated from the property and taken to a disposal site. If there’s still contamination left in the ground afterward, said Gillen, the gas station owner will have to perform a more formal site investigation. That means groundwater monitoring and more soil sampling. In the worst cases, the DEM will require a treatment system for groundwater and a soil vapor extraction system.

“It kind of goes from soup to nuts once the tanks come out,” said Gillen. “They have to achieve the groundwater soil standards before we can issue a ‘No further action’ letter.”

According to EPA data, there are 535,000 active petroleum underground storage tanks nationwide, and an additional 1,900 hazardous substance tanks. In Rhode Island that shakes out to around 1,089 active underground tanks, according to the EPA.

Gasoline leaks present very real environmental risks. Gasoline breaks down into hundreds of different compounds. Gillen said DEM is focused on BTEX, an acronym that stands for benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene. In older tanks, DEM monitors for methyl tert-butyl ether (MTBE), a gasoline additive that has been banned nationwide since 2005.

Clean-ups are funded via a sliver of the gas tax, which are deposited into a separate fund to furnish money for them. The latest DEM data issued in January shows 131 active leaking tanks, and 1,519 inactive ones. The department inspected 150 facilities between October 2022 and September 2023 and found a technical compliance rate of 31%.

Goncalves indicated it was the role of private market forces to remediate existing gas stations.

“The ideal is, if the contaminated soil can be remediated, materials removed, we could transform these areas into green spaces, portable housing, or community hubs that prioritize sustainability,” said Goncalves.

“But we have to let the private market dictate,” he added. “We have tremendous resources in our city. When it comes to gas stations and their tenants or folks who own those plots of lands, remediating the property from soil or groundwater contamination, the private market has to dictate it.”

Remediation is ultimately expensive, which leads to gas station properties becoming abandoned by their owners who don’t want to pony up the cash, and makes it difficult to turn a former gas station into anything else.

“It can really get up there in terms of expense,” said Gillen. “When that gas station and Mobil station knocked out all those wells in Pascoag in the early 2000s, that was millions of dollars spent out there.”

In the early 2000s, the water supply for the village of Pascoag in northwest Rhode Island was discovered to have been contaminated by MBTE. In early September 2001, gasoline 7 inches deep was discovered at the bottom of a ground monitoring well 20 feet from a gas station’s underground storage tanks. Pascoag Main Street Service stored gasoline in three of its five 6,000-gallon tanks.

Levels of MTBE in the water supply rose to 340 parts per billion by Sept. 1, 2001, and the Rhode Island Department of Health recommended water department customers switch to bottled water for drinking and cooking, and reduce the amount of time spent in the shower or bath.

Two lawsuits were subsequently filed, the second of which was only settled last year, over 20 years since the contamination was first discovered. The second lawsuit, filed in 2016 by the Rhode Island attorney general’s office, extracted more than $26 million from 11 fossil fuel companies.

In a statement, Smiley said his administration supported a plan to expand EV charging stations at existing gas stations rather than a ban on new gas stations.

“Without understanding the economic impact on residents and the role this industry has on building out our EV infrastructure as other communities have done successfully, it is not a responsible 11^th-hour decision,” according to Josh Estrella, a spokesperson for Smiley.

“This is a tricky thing to do,” said Goncalves. “But we’ve got to start somewhere.”

The City Council will consider the full comprehensive plan at its Nov. 7 meeting.

This story was updated Oct. 22 at 9:12 a.m. to reflect the changes in the proposed amendment made by the Providence Ordinance Council at its Oct. 21 meeting.