Custom Search

Thursday, March 22, 2007

Inver Grove Heights Couple Must Pay For Dump

Please click onto the comments for the post.

posted by Bob at Thursday, March 22, 2007

1 Comments:

Blogger Bob said...

Inver Grove couple must pay to clean up dump
Dakota County assesses $83,000 in dispute over contaminated home site
BY FREDERICK MELO
Pioneer Press
Article Last Updated: 03/21/2007 12:24:59 AM CDT


When John and Judy McEachran went digging to build a second house on their 1-acre lot in Inver Grove Heights, they discovered a cornucopia of crud. Among its unwanted treasures: Volkswagen-size bridgework, large metal pilings and old demolition debris.

After conferring with Dakota County, the husband-and-wife church leaders built their home in October 2004 and moved in. For two years, the county and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency tested the heaping piles of debris and eventually confirmed the worst.

At least some of the bridgework had asbestos that could have flaked into the dirt, requiring painstaking removal of each pile, load by load, to a special disposal site.

The couple thought the dirt piles were bad enough. But who would pay for the cleanup?

On Tuesday, they got their answer.

Over the protests of the couple's friends and neighbors, the Dakota County Board of Commissioners voted to assess the McEachrans nearly $83,000 for debris removal from the Cahill Court site, which took place during the summer. Commissioner Nancy Schouweiler, who represents Inver Grove Heights, cast the sole dissenting vote.

At 4 percent interest, the couple will pay $142,000 over the next 30 years, or about $400 a month. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency previously donated $50,000 in in-kind work toward the waste removal.

The McEachrans, both Methodist ministers, had begged county leaders for assistance. They said the county inspected the property as far back as 1984, but previous owners never put the contamination on the deed. The dump is listed as one of 2,200 problem properties in the county's database.
Visibly annoyed, the seven county commissioners said there was no reason Dakota County taxpayers should foot the McEachrans' bill. And they said the cleanup costs might have been much cheaper if they had removed the debris before putting a house in the path of work crews.

"Why aren't the McEachrans going after the people that contaminated the site?" said County Commissioner Joseph Harris. "That's the normal way to do things."

But whom to sue?

John McEachran said he met with a number of lawyers who told him litigation would be slow, complicated and costly, in part because of the number of potential defendants.

A previous owner, Ron Schmidt, is now the couple's friend and neighbor. Sometime around 1979, Schmidt or a business partner stuck a wooden sign in the ground announcing "Clean Fill Wanted," recalled Rudy Wegner, a longtime neighbor.

The practice of soliciting demolition fill was a common enough practice, before it was known that certain bridge and construction materials contained asbestos.

Schmidt, a middle school teacher and former City Council member, operated the dump with a city license, but the state ordered it closed in the 1980s.

"The Bible does (discourage) suing people," John McEachran told the commissioners. "I would rather eat this bill than make Ron lose his house."

The site's last owner, Mendota Homes, sold the McEachrans the property in 1999 without disclosing that it had previously been a dump.

Company founder John Mathern's daughter was the real estate agent on the sale, and the McEachrans recently learned that another couple had once planned to buy the acre from Mendota Homes but backed out after discovering signs of debris.

Mendota Homes sued Schmidt in 2000, but the case was settled within a year.

The McEachrans have filed a general insurance claim against the city of Inver Grove Heights and another with the state claims committee, alleging some of the asbestos material was municipal waste.

The McEachrans said they were grateful to their neighbors and to the parishioners from the three congregations they lead, some of whom drove 50 miles to attend Tuesday's hearing.

State Rep. Dennis Ozment, R-Rosemount, also advocated on the couple's behalf in December.

With thousands of old dump sites scattered across the state, he said the Legislature needs to take a hard look at determining whether unwitting property owners should be held responsible for cleanup and whether the state should chip in for costs.

"That means anytime I buy a piece of property, I must be pretty careful, because if I dig something up, they don't allow me to go and rebury it," Ozment said in an interview. "That's a huge obligation for people."

Frederick Melo can be reached at fmelo@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-2172

9:41 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home