Beatrice City Council committee tackling the 'elephant in the room'...the vacant Dempster property
BEATRICE, Neb. -- City officials have repeatedly acknowledged it will be a long time for the problem is resolved with the vacant Dempster Industries Plant in south Beatrice.
But a three-member committee is hoping to at least speed the process along, somewhat…one of three committees that gave their initial reports to the mayor and rest of the city council Monday night on various topics. Councilman Ted Fairbanks indicated some productive meetings have been held with state and federal environmental officials on the vacant, condemned property….which consists of eight different parcels.
"There's a lot of things we can do....a lot of things we can't do, but we can't do anything until we own it. So, one of the things I hope the committee will bring back to the council is that in the next budget, we put some money into it...because we have to own it, to control it." City Administrator Tobias Tempelmeyer says in order to own the property, the city has to purchase the tax sale certificates on the property….a painfully slow process. He estimates to purchase them is about $50,000.
Fairbanks says it appears there are federal assistance possibilities, perhaps separate grant opportunities for each parcel involved.
"There's some big federal dollars out right now...and they're going to go away in the next two years. They've been in place about a year and a half. They're offering up to about two million dollars for cleanup...just to clean up the site. But, we're going to need a new phase one study and there's some cost in that. Probably somewhere along the line we're going to have a hire a consultant....because as knowledgeable as the three of us are now, we still don't have the ability to consult for the rest of the city as to what happens."
In the committee’s conversations with state and EPA officials, having a proposed multi-use plan for the site could aid chances in getting cleanup assistance.
The city is familiar with cleanup costs. A coal gas plant that once existed near the Big Blue River was cleaned up at a cost of nearly $2 million, for which the city paid 25-percent of the cost.
Fairbanks said, "We're going to meet one more time here this next week or the week after, hopefully. We're going to condense this...get a scope of work, to apply for the grants that are both at the state and federal level. We have to provide them with what we're going to do...how the work is going to progress from here to the process until it's done. At the end of it....working backwards-forward....they want to know what we're going to do with the property, once it's done."
Earlier this year, city administration and members of the city council toured the interior of the Dempster plant and the surrounding property, reaffirming just how massive the cleanup project is. The site has been overgrown to the extent that it harbors a deer population.
