I found this for the Virtual Cache in 2005. This has been vacant my whole life.
-N 33° 59.343 W 083° 25.402
Been on the to do list since i started caching. got off work early, so i stopped in on the way home.
just by my house, technically i live off this road--it just changes names and about 5 miles down.
been passin past it all of my life. wondered why it was sitting vacant. guess i know. guess it isn't as bad as the westing house site.
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Fund raid may slow cleanups: Area sites on list
By Lee Shearer - lshearer@onlineathens.com
A last-minute legislative raid on a trust fund to clean up Georgia's hazardous waste sites could mean a slowdown in the pace of cleanups and a shift in costs to local taxpayers.
As lawmakers wrangled over putting together a balanced budget in the last days of the legislative session this year, they decided to transfer $4 million out of the trust fund to the general state budget - even though officials with the state Environmental Protection Division were predicting big shortfalls in their ability to pay for cleanups even before the legislature took the money.
Legislators also diverted to general appropriations $7 million from the surplus in a similar trust fund devoted to cleaning up abandoned scrap tires.
''This is going to be a very, very serious problem across the state,'' said Jennifer Giegerich of Georgia Public Interest Research Group.
Along with upcoming changes in state rules for hazardous site cleanup, the funding cuts will mean the state will have a tougher time overseeing cleanups conducted by local governments - mainly at old landfills - and at private industries, Giegerich said.
It will also mean the state cleans up fewer ''orphan'' sites, where the owner or ''responsible party'' is gone or bankrupt, she said.
More than 500 sites, including 20 in and around Athens, are on the state's Hazardous Site Inventory, a list of places where state regulators say that human health or the environment is threatened by toxic pollution.
Representatives of industry and local government also condemned the legislature's last-minute budget moves.
''We are gravely concerned,'' said Ross King, assistant director of the Association County Commissioners of Georgia. ''Counties have diligently paid into the fund. There are people who feel very strongly these fees were paid in good faith for environmental remediation.''
''Both of those trust funds were raided to help balance the budget,'' said Steve Levetan, a consultant and lobbyist for the recycling industry and chairman of the Georgia Chamber of Commerce Governmental Affairs Council's environmental committee. ''The department is not going to have the funding this year they told us they need.''
The legislative ''raid'' comes just a year after industry groups agreed to increased fees for the hazardous site fund, Levetan noted.
''We're very concerned that this has happened. I think it's a matter of trust,'' he said.
Even before the legislature took $4 million from the fund, EPD's Hazardous Waste Branch was feeling serious budgetary pain.
According to an April 9 memo from EPD Hazardous Waste Management Branch Chief Jennifer Kaduck to EPD Director Harold Reheis, more than 25 barrels of hazardous waste were simply left in place at a business in the small Northeast Georgia town of Martin in February when the owner failed to obey a state order to properly dispose of them.
''The state Superfund program is unable to dispose of the drums due to budget cuts,'' Kaduck explained in the memo.
The fund diversions could also mean more costs for local governments.
Athens-Clarke County spent about $8 million in a cleanup and containment project at the older part of the Athens-Clarke landfill on U.S. Highway 78, but got about $2 million in state help from the trust fund, said Athens-Clarke Solid Waste Director Jim Corley.
The county also recently got about $1.4 million from the state to help with the government's $3.2 million bill to clean up an abandoned landfill off Willow Street, near the North Oconee River downtown.
Athens-Clarke is also eligible for a $363,000 grant to pay for more of the cleanup, completed later in the budget cycle. But after talking to officials, Corley isn't sure the money will be there this year.
The fastest-growing category of sites on the state's Hazardous Site Inventory is old landfills, and Athens-Clarke could face more cleanup costs if - or when - more old landfills are discovered, Corley said.
''There are other sites that could crop up, old landfills, I don't know where - I haven't been here for 60 years,'' he said. Anyone who contributed to the pollution, including the local government, is responsible for paying for the cleanup.
Athens-Clarke could also face consequences from the money diverted from the scrap tire program, Corley said. In the past, the county has gotten hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants from the fund, including a $125,000 grant to build a ''materials recycling facility'' at the landfill.
State officials have indicated that new grants may dry up now, Corley said.
Athens-Clarke has a continuing grant from the scrap tire program that pays for a county employee to monitor tire retailers and to look for illegally dumped tires and other environmental violations. That money will continue, at least for now, Corley said.
The scrap tire fund comes from a $1 fee levied with the purchase of each new tire in the state.
Money in the hazardous waste fund comes mainly from fines, fees paid by industries and fees paid by trash haulers when they dump waste in landfills. Over the past decade, the fund has generated about $10 million a year, mostly going to cover cleanup costs.
Over that time, most of the state-funded cleanups were at major industrial sites. But over the next decade, about two-thirds of the fund's costs are expected to pay for cleanups at municipal solid waste landfills, said King of the county commissioners association.
Even before the legislature diverted money from the hazardous site fund, EPD officials were predicting shortfalls of nearly $100 million in the fund's ability to pay cleanup costs over the next decade - even with the fee increases the legislature approved last year.
Diversions from the trust fund will make it impossible for the EPD to implement proposed changes in the way it regulates hazardous sites, Giegerich said.
Giegerich and representatives of state industry, government, environmental organizations and other groups met several times last year to try to reconcile opposing concerns in the state's hazardous site cleanup rules. Industry's complaints are that Georgia's rules are too costly and inefficient, and environmentalists' complaints are that the state's rules don't do an adequate job of protecting public health.
Those at the meeting were able to achieve only partial agreement, and the state Board of Natural Resources is expected to vote on the amendments later this month. But even those small gains are threatened by the legislature's siphoning off money from the hazardous site fund, Giegerich said.
The new rules are designed in part to save businesses money, but would mean more government monitoring costs, she said.
''It was a consensus process, but my position all along was that we would agree to this if there was funding to do them. We were talking about expanded funding but they're getting less funding,'' she said. ''It's going to cost the state more. I don't believe they can pay for the rules.''
TOXIC SITES
Nearly 20 sites in Athens and surrounding counties have leaked enough toxic chemicals or metals into surrounding soil or groundwater to earn a spot in the Georgia Environmental Protection Division's 2002 ''Hazardous Site Inventory.'' Evaluations or cleanups are under way in most of them. Here are the sites and a brief summary of toxins released. For more detailed information, visit the state Environmental Protection Division Web site, www.dnr.state.ga.us/dnr/environ, and click on the ''Georgia's Environment'' link.
Athens Grain Elevator/Oakwood Mobile Home Park, 3490 Old Jefferson Road, Athens; carbon tetrachloride, other chemicals
Published in the Athens Banner-Herald on Sunday, June 1, 2003.
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