Whistleblower: Toxic mess left for county

An immense black hole in a snow-covered lot in north Minneapolis is all that's left of Ken's Metal Finishing, after owner Kenneth LaCroix walked away from a toxic mess that has cost taxpayers $600,000 and counting.

The small metal plating business was shut down in early 2008 by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. A few months later, in a rare emergency action, the EPA hauled out barrels of cyanide and acid and other waste that threatened the Hawthorne and Jordan neighborhoods.

Last month, cleanup workers funded by a $260,700 contract with Hennepin County were back at 2323 Emerson Av. N. They knocked down the century-old building and carted away truckloads of contaminated dirt to a landfill in Peoria, Ill. The cleanup work could be finished as soon as this week. By spring, the site should be a grassy and level lot.

No one expects LaCroix to reimburse the government for spending up to $900,000 cleaning up after his business. Federal officials reviewed the businessman's assets and decided suing him wasn't worth the expense, county officials said.

"What can you do with the guy?" said Gil Gabanski, a Hennepin County environmental services employee who's overseeing the project. "In the long run, he has no assets. He basically walked away from it."

A woman who answered the phone at LaCroix's home in Maple Grove declined to comment.

To address the problems caused by property owners who abandon contaminated sites, Hennepin County created an environmental response fund in 2001. Anyone who transfers property or registers a mortgage in the county supports the fund through a 0.01 percent deed and mortgage tax. So far, the fund has paid out more than $30 million to investigate 225 polluted sites and clean up about 60 of them, said Dave Jaeger, supervisor of the county's contaminated lands unit.

Records don't show how much of that money was reimbursed by the polluters, but Jaeger said it's minimal. The alternative to taxpayer-funded cleanups, county officials say, is allowing these contaminated lands to sit neglected, forfeited for back taxes, shunned by any developer.

County lawyers always search for assets, such as insurance policies, that could be tapped to defray the cost.

"We try really hard to make sure we're not letting anybody off the hook," Jaeger said. "Nobody likes to see the polluter get off."

Yet LaCroix faced only a $1,000 fine, despite the EPA cleanup in 2008 that cost at least $300,000. The state repossessed the last asset of Ken's Metal Finishing, its property, two months after the "emergency removal action," because LaCroix owed $10,767 in property taxes.

Ken's Metal Finishing opened in 1978 in what used to be a corner grocery store, and specialized in custom plating projects, such as chrome plating motorcycle parts and bluing gun barrels. Those activities required a witch's brew of chemicals stored in vats and barrels. Over the years, leaks and spills soaked into the building and the soil underneath it.

By 2002, the fire department and the county's environmental services agency were worried that the roof might fall in and that chemicals were leaking out of corroded containers. The next year, the toxic troubles at Ken's Metal Finishing drew the attention of city, county, state and federal officials. The problem came to a head in early 2008. The EPA shut down the business because of sloppy handling of hazardous waste. An inspection revealed 180 containers of dangerous substances in a poorly secured building, posing "imminent and substantial" danger.

The emergency removal action in April 2008 eliminated the immediate threat. A $53,000 county grant paid for surveys that pinpointed how far the contamination had spread. Last fall, the county hired specialty contractor Carl Bolander & Sons Co. of St. Paul for the final phase. That work got underway on Jan. 18 when an excavator crushed the old shop into heaps of splintered wood and shattered concrete. Last week, workers dug down 15 feet deep to ensure that they wouldn't miss any residual pollution.

Gabanski said he hopes that the site will be a vacant lot by spring, and then someday, homes or an apartment building will be built that fit into the neighborhood.

Terry Branigan, a staff attorney for the EPA in Chicago, said his agency still has a year to try to recover its emergency cleanup costs from Ken's Metal Finishing. He wouldn't comment on whether the EPA will try to do that. As for the $1,000 fine, LaCroix has paid that in full, Branigan said.