Allegan County might get a late Christmas gift that will help clean up a portion of the industrial property it owns in Otsego—property it had hoped to unload by the end of this year.
In trying to market the former Rock Tenn factory, Allegan County executive director of services Dan Wedge said they met recently with one developer who is interested but hesitant, given some of the toxic asbestos insulation cleanup costs that plague the site.
They eventually learned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency might have emergency cleanup funds to use at the site in the near future.
Wedge said, “We had a meeting with a potential developer. His biggest concern was the unknown cost for the asbestos cleanup.”
There are two types of asbestos that need to be cleaned up on the property. There is the intact asbestos on some boilers in one building as well as in the power house building. Wedge estimated this made up 75 percent of the asbestos.
The rest is loose asbestos, scattered throughout the powerhouse and the basement of a secondary structure when the former owner of the property was stripping the buildings of valuable metal for salvage. The owner of that company, Anthony Davis with Cogswell Properties LLC, was convicted for purposely not properly cleaning up the asbestos.
Cogswell stopped paying the taxes on the property in 2007; the county gained possession in 2011, at which point the back taxes totaled nearly $250,000.
“The unknown costs of (that cleanup) are kind of the roadblock,” Wedge said. “We reached out with assistance from our environmental consultant to the EPA to see if there were any funds to help with any portion of this.
“And their response back was that they would consider using emergency cleanup funds for the loose asbestos within the building.”
That’s all pending a site evaluation, which got bumped due to the snow last week. There is no date set for that yet. If the funds could be used, the EPA itself would handle the cleanup.
Wedge said, “That would get us one step closer to drawing down the cost.”
He said he wasn’t aware of any other types of contamination on the site. He also declined to identify the interested developer.
The county’s environmental consultant is John D’Addona with Ann Arbor-based Environmental Consulting & Technology. Wedge said D’Addona had estimated 25 percent of the total asbestos on site is loose—but that portion would be the most difficult to clean up.
Previous estimates of the total asbestos removal price tag were pegged at between $2 million and $4 million.
This would not be the EPA’s first foray into cleaning up the site. In 2011, a grant-funded survey of the property found approximately 200 drums and other containers of chemicals the EPA deemed hazardous and removed the following year.
Wedge said he was encouraged by this turn in the property’s fate and thought it would help keep interest in the property alive.
Contact Ryan Lewis at rmlewis@allegannews.com or (269) 673-5534.
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