Since 2017, the Town Planning Board has designated the Cadogan Street Temporary Garden in Kennedy Town an “open space” in land use zoning, so it has continued to serve the community as a park. Since then, members of the local community and some scholars have also requested the Civil Engineering and Development Department to remove the garden site from the scope of its Kennedy Town decontamination project. We point out that the soil at the site does not need to be decontaminated and the park should in fact be kept open for public use during soil decontamination in nearby areas, to serve as a filtration barrier to protect users’ health. Sadly, the department has insisted that soil decontamination is necessary at the Cadogan garden, based on an environmental impact assessment done around 20 years ago, without retesting the soil to ascertain whether decontamination is needed now. The department also indicated that the decontamination site will be 3 metres deep, which is much more than the depth of the surface soil (around 1 metre) required for decontamination, according to international standards. In March, with agreement from the Leisure and Cultural Services Department, I invited decontamination expert Professor Chiu Siu-wai and her team from the Chinese University of Hong Kong to collect soil samples for testing by an accredited laboratory, to run soil contaminant analyses to assess the need of decontamination. The results indicate that the contaminants found in the originally polluted sites, including heavy metals and carcinogenic benzo(a)pyrene, are now all at very low and safe levels not exceeding the action threshold for soil decontamination in public parks. In 20 years, through phytoremediation (by trees, shrubs and grasses) and natural effort (weathering, microbial activities, solar irradiation, vaporisation), the pollutants have decreased significantly. Living near one of city’s parks helps boost your mental health, study finds If the civil engineering department believes its data collected 20 years ago is still valid, and further assumes contaminants can only increase in this time, is this environmental impact assumption and procedure a fault to be rectified? The Civil Engineering and Development Department and the Environmental Protection Department should take action to properly retest the soil, amend the environmental impact assessment permit accordingly and rectify the decontamination decision. I urge all Hongkongers to support our quest to avoid doing this unnecessary decontamination work at the Cadogan garden that will waste taxpayers’ money, disturb residents’ use of the park and potentially cause damage to the landscape and trees there. Please join our campaign. Cherry Wong Kin-ching, Central & Western District Councillor (Kennedy Town & Mount Davis)