After contamination was recently discovered in areas set to be part of the city’s downtown redevelopment, the City of Stoughton will spend up to $76,215 for additional soil sampling to determine the scope of the problem.
At the City Council meeting on Tuesday, March 22, members voted unanimously to approve the spending, which would come out of the area’s Tax Incremental Financing fund.
The discovery of contamination on city and Stoughton Redevelopment Authority lands on Fourth and E. South St. about to be sold to developer Curt Brink has necessitated pushing back the closing date on Brink’s proposed project’s first phase from Feb. 28 to July 29.
At the Feb. 24 City Council meeting, Chris Valcheff of TruNorth Consulting, the city’s environmental consultant, told city officials that pentachlorophenol, a wood preservative, was identified at the MillFab site in several test pits. He said the chemical was commonly used on utility poles and railroad ties. He said there were also elevated concentrations of volatile organics and Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) in some test pits.
Valcheff explained that since the findings result in a “new condition” at the property, that information needs to be incorporated into the material management plan. He said while the Stoughton’s agreement with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources states that the city is not responsible for remediation of the site, the DNR can’t approve a material management plan “until we know where this stuff is and how much it is impacting it.”
City director of planning and development Rodney Scheel said Tuesday that TruNorth has since worked with the DNR to “at least verbally understand the scope of work they thought would be necessary to track or identify the contamination areas, and this represents their understanding of that scope of work.”
“We’re trying to keep this thing moving,” said Mayor Tim Swadley. “Obviously, we all want to see work get started this year.”
