New land for Lake township will not come in the form of a retired industrial excess landfill on Cleveland Avenue, said township Fiscal Officer Ben Sommers.
“Absolutely not,” he said.
The 31.4-acre property was offered to Lake Township by Putman Properties last year at a low price, said Sommers, but after discussion and investigation, township administration wanted no part of it.
"They offered it to us and gave us a good price," said Sommers. "We looked at it, but we decided at no price do we want it."
Putman Properties has been asking for $15,000 per acre for a total of $470,400 for the owners Hyman Budoff and Merle and Charles Kittinger in an agreement to sell the Superfund site. Any profit made on the site will be used to pay for expenses from work and testing over 26 years for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Though the sand and gravel Superfund site, placed on the list in 1984, might look like a deal for a buyer's market, the Stark County Auditor's office values the entire property at $26,600 currently for what comes along with the topsoil: dumped toxins.
From 1966 to 1980, the site took waste of "largely undetermined and unknown
composition," according to the EPA, and was used as a dumping ground for waste and chemicals, including those from four Akron-area rubber companies: Goodyear, B.F. Goodrich, Bridgestone-Firestone and GenCorp. Despite claims of radioactive dumping and toxic waste by citizens who tell stories of tankers bearing the radiation symbol trailing into the site after hours, EPA tests have not definitively found evidence of radioactive waste. Since 2000, the EPA has been doing ground water sampling, tested through labs hired by the same companies.
Originally, the 1989 plan was to install a clay cap on the property, treating the contaminated groundwater through a pump and treat system. In 2000, that plan was trashed in favor of a plan in which the land was naturally attenuated of waste through the movement of groundwater.
Despite testing, the U.S. District Court agreement reached two years ago resolved the lawsuits brought by the EPA against the IEL operators and customers. The sale will help repay the EPA for continued investigation of the property. The land's new owners will be required to keep the land by several heavy restrictions and provide annual written documentation that they are being obeyed, including rules determining the use of the land itself. Groundwater from the site cannot be extracted or used in any way without EPA consent. The EPA must approve any excavations or any alternative land use not supported by a risk assessment. Residential use is banned outright, while the connected lots that line Cleveland Avenue are owned by the federal government and are not for sale.
Past Lake township administration looked into uses for the lot, but the former landfill held too many potentially deadly secrets to be useful to the township, said Sommers.
"We looked at it because of the price," he said, "but we are not at all interested. We have no use for it. It would be a liability."
