There is no question that the Greenmanville Avenue property that Stonington purchased almost two years ago for its proposed Boathouse Park is polluted with hazardous waste, including known carcinogens.

The town documented the existence of the contamination in a grant request in 2016 to the state Department of Economic and Community Development's Office of Brownfield Remediation and Development, seeking $200,000 to, among other things, assess how bad the pollution is. No money was asked for cleanup.

The actual land mass for the park site is likely in part accumulated coal slag or coal ash, dumped over the years from the former Rossie velvet mill across the street, and includes petroleum, heavy metals and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, the town said in its Nov. 15, 2016, application for a brownfield assessment grant, which was signed by First Selectman Rob Simmons.

Two years later, is it not clear how much of an environmental assessment has been done, since the town has only drawn down $50,000 of the $200,000 grant approved by DECD. The grant application said the work would be done over 18 months and that the town would issue quarterly reports on its progress. No reports have been filed with the state.

I had a lot of questions for Simmons when I got him on the phone Wednesday morning. What is the status of the assessment? Why hasn't the town drawn down more of the assessment grant money? What more do we know, two years after the grant was requested, about pollution on the site and what it is going to take to clean it up?

Most important, why are members of the Stonington High School crew team using the site, storing rowing shells in the existing building there and launching them in the Mystic River, where there could be contaminated soils?

The first selectman had no good answers for me.

He said it is the school coaches who have allowed the use of the property and said I should ask them about the students using the polluted site. I don't think I've ever seen such swift buck passing.

As for the status of the environmental assessment, Simmons referred me to Chad Frost of the Mystic landscape architectural firm Kent + Frost, which the town has hired to do a master plan for the park. Frost did not return a phone message.

Remarkably, the first selectman, though, has been front and center in all other aspects of planning for the $2.2 million park, which voters approved, from discussing placement of parking spaces and the final park name to planning a town forum to discuss the design of the boathouse building.

What's the point of all that if you have no idea how extensive the pollution is and how much it is going to cost to clean it up?

The first selectman led the town into buying a brownfield without knowing the answers to these crucial questions. And the park planning fantasy continues with no public answers to the most pressing questions regarding the site.

There are legal and political fights unfolding nationwide over coal ash pollution, including lawsuits for deaths attributed to workers contaminated in a Tennessee spill cleanup. A federal judge shot down a move by the Trump administration to roll back coal ash regulations.

I reached out to some of the environmental groups that are raising awareness about coal ash risks, including the Sierra Club and Earth Justice, a legal environmental advocacy group.

Josh Berman, a senior attorney with the Sierra Club, told me "there is an incredible lack of appreciation for how toxic" coal ash can be. He seemed surprised that young people might be allowed to use a likely coal ash dump for recreation.

"The stuff is really, really dangerous," he said.

This is the opinion of David Collins.

d.collins@theday.com