Foul Suggestion: Requiring Homeowners to Clean Up Soil Contamination Before Selling

On Wednesday, my husband and I attended the Tacoma Smelter Plume Cleanup Plan meeting and something struck us as a horrible suggestion, especially being new homeowners: requiring sampling and cleanup before real-estate sales.

“If I can’t afford to do the clean up, then you’re imprisoning me in my home,” my husband said during the meeting.

I immediately went into the mama mode, rubbed his back and gave him the back-off look.

I get his point. I honestly do. We bought our first home in UP just over a year ago, and we already paid too much. If we tried to sell, we’d lose money, but we bought the house knowing that fact. 

We never planned on paying anyone to remove inches and inches of contaminated soil before we decided to sell our home. That would be a major financial burden for us, and it would result in us basically paying somebody else to move into our house.

Currently, we don't even have our results back, so we don't know how high our contamination level may be.

We aren’t required to remove lead paint from our almost 100-year-old house, nor are we required to remove asbestos. I want a healthy, clean yard. I do, but I also don't want to be forced to clean it up. If we aren't lucky enough to be part of the few thousand houses that get it for free, we'd be forced to pay for the errors of others. It doesn't seem right.

The Department of Ecology plan includes a designated $64 million in funds for free sampling and clean up, in addition to $30 million for education, soil safety programs, outreach and staffing costs. The department plans to sample 17,000 homes within the high zone of the plume. Yes, this includes University Place; we are not immune to the smelter’s damage.

Of those 17,000 homes, the department expects to complete about 2,000 cleanups. So, where does that leave those yards which yield high results for lead and arsenic, and happen to be in the other 15,000? Will they be part of the “too bad so sad” group because the state no longer has the money to offer free cleanup? Where does the burden fall?

Cleaning up isn’t cheap. We aren’t talking $1,000 or $2,000 per house. Costs include excavation, trucks to transport the soil, a dump tipping fee per ton, labor costs for the job, new soil and landscaping to put the yard back together. It’s not cheap.

This meeting raised many questions and had my husband and I concerned about the direction of the cleanup and the proposed plan.

The good thing about the meeting is that it was intended to be a forum for citizens to provide suggestions and input on the plan and the direction the Department of Ecology is taking with the cleanup.

The department needs our input because in all honesty, the $94 million settlement from bankrupted Asarco isn’t going to clean up everybody’s yard for free and keep programs like soil safety programs running forever.

The public-comment timeframe ends Dec. 20, so if you’d like to make suggestions or comment on the proposed plan, now is the time to do that.

There's one last chance to attend an open forum at 6:30 p.m. on Dec. 6 in Des Moines at the city's Activity Center on 216th Street.

To read more about the plan and its effects go here.