An empty pit is shown at Heritage Square.

Astoria is moving closer to turning a hazardous lot downtown into a usable public space.

On Monday night, the City Council voted to authorize a grant application for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s brownfield cleanup program, a request for about $2 million to cap the city block known as Heritage Square and fill the pit left by the former Safeway building.

Stretching from the Garden of Surging Waves to the corner of 12th and Duane streets, Heritage Square has sat vacant for over 20 years, since Safeway moved out of downtown. The city has attempted to clean up the site several times, including with the help of a previous brownfields grant in 2012, but some contamination remains.

In a shift from a previous proposal to develop a workforce housing project at the site, the city is working with Friends of Heritage Square to move toward the installation of a public space with an amphitheater, plaza, pavilion and parking lot. Last month, the city voted to hire Portland-based firm First Forty Feet to lead a public engagement process and develop a plan for the site based on community input.

The city is aiming to resolve the environmental issues so development can move forward. Graeme Taylor, a project manager with Stantec, the city’s contractor, spoke to the City Council on Monday.

“The city of Astoria wants to finish the job, so they want to figure out how to clean that site and put the site back into productive reuse,” Taylor said. “That’s what brownfields are all about. We’re all about putting sites back into productive reuse, giving them new life for a whole host of things: economic development, housing … and just the benefit to the community to remove blight.”

Stantec recommended the city build a cap of plastic and gravel to cover the residual contamination, a much more cost-effective solution than the alternative option of completely removing the contaminants with an excavator.

If the city’s grant application is successful, funds would be available — with no matching contribution required from the city — next fall.

City councilors expressed frustration that capping the site would not completely eliminate the contaminants, but ultimately voted unanimously in favor of submitting the grant application.

“In general, I would prefer for us to take a more complete and comprehensive cleanup option so that we had maximum flexibility going forward, and so we mitigated as much risk as possible,” City Councilor Andy Davis said.

Taylor also explained that the cap is not designed to withstand a Cascadia Subduction Zone event or serious flooding.

“I think we would all love to have it completely mitigated and not have any worries about what might happen in the future,” Mayor Sean Fitzpatrick said. “But this is one of those things where no decision is worse than the wrong decision … We recognize that this may be the lesser of the evils and allow us to move forward. Twenty years of nothing and an opportunity to do something is better than another 20 years of not doing anything or not moving forward with it.”