DAYTON — The 15 or so Dayton residents who have had to drive on a road through the Valleycrest landfill Superfund site to get to work and home are one step closer to not having to do that anymore.
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The city is using $250,000 won in a negotiated legal settlement involving the city, the Ohio EPA and federal EPA to build a permanent road (right-of-way) for those residents living near the landfill, whose boundaries are Valleycrest Drive and Brandt Pike (state Route 201), City Manager Shelley Dickstein told News Center 7′s Mike Campbell on Wednesday.
The settlement money means the days are numbered for the temporary road that was built while the federal government was cleaning the site. The Dayton City Commission, on Wednesday morning, voted to accept the settlement.
“As we got to the close on this site, residents really didn’t want to have to drive through the Superfund site every day to get to their homes,” the city manager said.
The settlement money allows the city to acquire the necessary property to construct the permanent right-of-way that does not go through the site. Now comes the design and build stage of the project, she said.
Now that the city has the funding, the city can go forward with preparing the bid and contracting out the work, Dickstein said, noting that the federal government has addressed the critical contamination, she said.
A permanent road that doesn’t include a dead end at the landfill site is what residents living near the landfill have been fighting for, Kristie McCloud said.
“I’m happy. I’m very pleased to hear that,” said McCloud, who has lived in the area 10 years. “I’m overjoyed about it.”
More than half the 102-acre North Sanitary Valleycrest Landfill was used for landfilling industrial and municipal wastes into unlined former gravel pits, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The site sits atop and wihtin a federal desginated, sole-source aquifer. Landfill operations contaminated soil and groundwater with hazardous chemicals.
The EPA added the Valleycrest Landfill to the National Priorities List in 1994. The EPA was the lead agency for a Superfund Removal Program cleanup between 1998 and 2003 to address immediate threats to human health and the environment.
In October 2018, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio approved a consent degree, which requires responsible parties to carry out a $35 million cleanup of the site, according to the EPA.
Currently, the EPA says, the landfill is in the remedial design/remedial action stage of the Superfund process.
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