Property slated for a housing project at Fort Meade contains some hazardous materials but is suitable for redevelopment, according to environmental documents that the Army released yesterday.

After initially declining to provide the reports to a review board and The Sun, Army officials released yesterday several studies conducted months ago on land that Fort Meade is leasing to a private company. The contractor plans to build about 3,000 houses for soldiers there.

The documents confirm the presence of asbestos, radon and lead-based paint at the property on the post's north side. They warn that three transformers using PCBs - polychlorinated biphenyls - are in use on the Anne Arundel County base.

The studies document three PCB leaks in the early 1990s at MacArthur Manor, part of the area slated for the overhaul, but said that the leaks had been cleaned up. Exposure to PCBs can irritate skin and cause liver damage.

Despite those findings, the documents give the 5,500-acre base a clean bill of health for its privatization plan, a $3 billion initiative under which a private company, Picerne Real Estate Group, will build and manage the new houses under a 50-year lease.

"The environmental baseline survey found a general lack of evidence of contamination or hazardous substance releases in the vicinity of the housing parcel properties based on inspection, interviews, research, and analysis of historical data," one report read.

The Army released the documents after members of the Restoration Advisory Board, the panel of regulators and area residents that has been monitoring the base's cleanup efforts since it was placed on the Environmental Protection Agency's Superfund list of hazardous sites in 1998, complained this week that they never received them. Army officials signed all the documents May 1, and Picerne assumed management of all property the same day.

The documents include an environmental assessment, a baseline environmental study and a finding that the houses are suitable for transfer to Picerne and that the land is suitable to lease. Col. Michael Stewart, Fort Meade garrison commander, maintained that all members of the board received the environmental assessment.

But he said he decided against sharing the suitability studies with the board because he wanted to move the deal along and feared that a review process would slow the process. A staffing cut at the Army Department of Public Works crippled its ability to handle routine maintenance requests, and soldiers were complaining.

That reasoning did not sit well with Robert Stroud, the EPA's remedial program manager, whose office is at Fort Meade less than a mile from Stewart's. Stroud received the documents late yesterday.

"If they would have just come to us and told us what they were doing, and asked us to review it, it wouldn't have taken us long," Stroud said. "But they were even leaving their own people out of the loop."

Stewart said he never meant to exclude the board.

"We always intended to give these documents to the RAB," he said. "Unfortunately, we got overwhelmed by the deal."

A groundbreaking for the project is scheduled for today.