NEW YORK CITY-A year after proposing Newtown Creek as a candidate for its list of severely polluted sites, the US Environmental Protection Agency on Monday confirmed that the heavily contaminated waterway will be designated a Superfund site. The move had the backing of community activists as well as the Bloomberg administration.

“Newtown Creek is a key urban waterway, which provides recreational and economic resources to many communities,” Judith Enck, EPA regional administrator based in New York City, says in a statement. “Throughout the investigation and cleanup, we will work closely with the communities along the creek to achieve a revitalization of this heavily-contaminated urban waterway.”

The Newtown Creek Alliance, one of the most active local groups seeking Superfund designation for the 3.8-mile creek separating Brooklyn and Queens, says it supports the EPA’s decision. However, the group adds that “we want to adamantly reinforce our concerns that the planning and remediation process be conducted in a manner that minimizes negative impacts for the businesses and community-supported development projects near the creek.”

In particular, the NCA says it's interested in making sure that the planned dredging at the mouth of the creek and along Whale Creek proceed as scheduled, along with construction of affordable housing at Hunter’s Point in Queens, and the construction of public open space at 65 Commercial St. in Brooklyn. "It’s also important that the EPA quickly identify staging sites during the course of remediation so that developers may move forward with plans for other sites," according to the NCA.

The city and state have devoted considerable attention in recent years to cleaning up the heavily polluted creek, at one time the country’s busiest industrial port. However, the NCA says a clean creek would be “inconceivable” without federal support. Sewage and industrial contaminants have been dumped into the creek since 1856, and there have been spills from nearby refineries that have been estimated to total nearly three times the amount of oil discharged into Alaskan coastal waters during the Exxon Valdez accident in 1989.

Cleanup of the creek could take 10 years and cost $500 million, according to published reports. The creek joins the Gowanus Canal on the EPA’s Superfund National Priorities list, making it the second site in the city to receive such a designation.