Trash talk
I feel for John and Judy McEachran.
The Inver Grove Heights couple faced a $67,000 assessment from Dakota County for soils cleanup regarding asbestos-containing materials uncovered on their townhome property during excavation work that began in 2004.
Apparently, their property was where old bridges went to die.
They discovered the area was once an unregulated construction-materials landfill. To their surprise, the McEachrans found out that Dakota County’s environmental policies charge current property owners with environmental cleanup costs, no matter who is responsible for the mess.
Fortunately, last week the state settled on paying the $67,000 assessment. It’s the largest environmental assessment ever charged a residential property in Dakota County.
The McEachrans were relieved, to say the least. But, we should all be at least a little bit concerned.
First off, the previous property owners were never required to disclose the history of the property to the McEachrans when they purchased the site.
Second, Thisweek’s Dakota County reporter Laura Adelmann revealed in a 2006 article that the county has more than 2,400 waste sites that would need to be cleaned up for others to development on those sites. So, who’s going to pay those costs? I mean, some of the sites could be relatively easy to clean up, but others are large, complex sites that could pose a human health threat.
If this is the largest environmental assessment ever charged in the county, what happens when the next one comes along? Certainly, we can’t expect individual property owners to pay. These former dump sites are the consequence of development throughout the area – our communities, our infrastructure. It should be a shared responsibility in cleaning them up if they need to be cleaned up.
Yet, the costs for cleaning up these sites could be astronomical if they all came in at one time. Since the county and state have decided to handle each case on a case-by-case basis, we have to hope they won’t all come up at the same time.