Photo courtesy of here.

There is an old saying, “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” I asked a friend of mine who worked with horses all his life about this saying and he explained that there are many reasons why one SHOULD look a gift horse in the mouth, in fact, one would be a fool not to.  Similarly, one should always check out free gifts of industrial property.  Anybody who has paid attention to the news in the past thirty years knows about toxic waste sites, poisons, lead paint, Superfund, groundwater contamination, and underground storage tanks.  Cleaning up such sites can cost many millions of dollars.

So it is surprising to find out that Hamilton County accepted the “gift” of the old Kahn’s site without doing an Environmental Site Assessment (ESA).  An ESA is the equivalent of looking a horse in the mouth and gives an indication as to what environmental problems there may be.  They are routine for purchases of industrial sites.  Cleaning up environmental problems may cost more than what the land and building are otherwise worth.  In any event, it would be against the law to tear down and build a new jail on the site unless an ESA is done and the environmental contamination is cleaned up.

The “Comprehensive Safety Plan” booklet boasts that building a new jail on the donated land will save about $7 million (p. 13).  But without doing an ESA it is impossible to guess if there will be any clean-up costs, let alone what the clean-up costs would be.

The deed where the commissioners accepted the “gift” of the Kahn’s site specifically states that the county will not hold Kahn’s liable for any hazardous or toxic wastes or substances found in, on, under, or related to the site.  That should have served as a warning to the commissioners.  See for yourself.

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