A former creosote plant in downtown Columbus is set to become a parking lot for county employees.
The Columbus Redevelopment Commission voted Monday to hire August Mack Environmental to abandon and remove monitoring wells at the brownfield site. The contract has a not-to-exceed amount of $12,700.
According to August Mack’s proposal, the company will work to abandon approximately 38 groundwater monitoring wells, monitoring points and piezometers associated with the former wood treating facility at 53 Lafayette Ave. This includes all of the wells on site and all of the “down-gradient monitoring wells,” said Columbus Redevelopment Director Heather Pope.
Pope said she believes the commission gained ownership of the site around 2011.
“It was a former creosote plant, and it burned,” she said. “And so the site’s considered contaminated. We took off several layers of soil, put down a membrane, replaced the soil and then have done multiple years of monitoring each quarter. And now we are at a point where (Indiana) Brownfields feels like we’ve done a sufficient amount of monitoring and are able to remove the wells.”
This site will then be paved over and developed into a future parking lot for Bartholomew County employees as part of the new court services building at 555 First St., Pope said. Flaherty & Collins, which is the city’s development partner on The Taylor apartment complex and urban grocer at 725 Second St., will also develop the lot.
August Mack has indicated it can get on-site in a couple of weeks and that the removal work should only take a couple of days, said Pope
