The bill for cleaning up pollutants left by the US Navy at Morgan’s Point could be lower than originally estimated according to site developer Craig Christensen.The former Progressive Labour Party Government agreed to take responsibility for the clean-up after it gave the developer 80 acres of the 240-acre brownfield site in exchange for reserve land at Southlands in 2008.Government then spent three years in talks with the US Government in an attempt to persuade Washington to pay for the remediation work, but in March 2011 the then-Works & Engineering Minister Derrick Burgess confirmed that those talks had failed, and that the taxpayer would be hit with a cleaning bill in the region of $35-$38 million.The land swap agreement was legally finalised in June 2012 and clean-up work began shortly after.Mr Christensen said he had been in regular contact with Government to discuss the clean-up — and that initial investigations of the site had resulted in “good news”.“We’ve been having a number of meetings with Government monitoring progress and that they’ve probably gone through 80 percent of the asbestos already,” Mr Christensen said.“I think the extent of pollution at Morgan’s Point may have been greatly exaggerated previously. It looks like a lot of the pipelines may have been cleaned prior to US departure, which is good news because trying to remediate soil is a time-consuming and expensive process so it’s likely there’s going to be some savings there. They’re still in the investigation stage but so far the investigation looks like it's a lot better than anyone anticipated and we were pleasantly surprised. There’s nothing out there that is really harmful. Where they thought there would be major issues have turned out to be either clean or almost clean so it’s looking a lot better for both us and the Government.”Mr Christensen pointed out that most of the pollutants have been found on Government-owned areas of the property rather than on the 80 acres owned by the developer.“There are very few issues relating to the Morgan’s Point development, so the site is a lot cleaner than what was expected, “he said.“There isn’t any major remediation work left to be completed in the area that we wish to develop, so therefore it gives us a green light to move. And the areas where remediation work is necessary are not anywhere near any hotel or residential components, so we’re sufficiently buffered to ensure that we can start work.Mr Christensen said that, had Government not agreed to the clean-up, the development would probably not have gone ahead.And he also said he believed it unlikely that the US Government would ever agree to pay for the clean-up — because that would expose it to further claims for compensation from other jurisdictions where it had had a military presence.“We traded a greenfield site for a brownfield site and we needed that to be an equal exchange, clean for clean,” he said.“Knowing what we know now, having talked to overseas financiers and developers, if we hadn’t had Government coming in to do the clean-up I think it would have been impossible to develop Morgan’s Point,” he said.“It would have been impossible because, if you go to a financier and there on the first page of your proposal is a reference to any pollution, well, you’re shown the door.“That’s why it was necessary for the Government to take responsibility. I know there was a move to get the US Government to take on that responsibility which it obviously didn’t. That was at the time in ‘08 when the US was just about to pop into that recessionary period and — Bermuda being one of 350 bases — that would open up a whole can of worms.”