David Michael Miller
The building now being demolished by the state is known to have contained asbestos, PCBs, heavy metals and other hazardous substances.
Sam Breidenbach, owner of TDS Custom Construction, specializes in the remodeling of older homes. As such, he has to deal with stringent regulations for dealing with substances like lead paint.
“When we don’t comply with those lead-safe guidelines, we expose ourselves to very serious five-digit fines,” Breidenbach says. “We’re compelled to uphold the law, and we’re happy to do it, because it’s good for our clients and our employees.”
Regulations require Breidenbach to inform his customers about the risks and hazards of lead paint and how he will deal with it.
It’s one reason Breidenbach is miffed about how the state Department of Administration is handling the demolition of a 100-year-old building behind his company on Madison’s east side. The building, located between Dickinson and Thornton streets along the Capital City bike trail, is being demolished to make way for a new state archive facility.
“The state is basically not meeting our simple request for setting up a meeting,” Breidenbach says. “When people don’t understand the process, that uncertainty breeds a lot of fear, speculation and anger.”
The building has been a foundry, a munitions factory and an appliance factory as well as the home of UW Tandem Press. As such, it is known to contain remnants of numerous hazardous materials, including asbestos, PCBs, PCEs, heavy metals, lead and more.
Several neighbors are worried about the way these hazardous materials are being contained and disposed of. There are fears about dust created when parts of the facility are razed. Many are also worried about runoff into the nearby Yahara River.
Matthew Miller, who calls himself a “citizen scientist” and has experience working in soil testing, lives less than a mile downwind from the site. He and others have been trying to determine what types of water, soil and air testing the state has done, and what those tests have found. The state has not been forthcoming.
“When people don’t have information, they tend to worry, and the human mind goes towards the worst-case scenario,” Miller says. “Having more testing would alleviate angst.”
Fears about what pollutants might be spread with the dust as walls are knocked over were fueled this week, when O’Keeffe Middle School was evacuated on both Monday and Tuesday after several children complained about coughing and sore throats. Although there’s no evidence to link the evacuation with the demolition, a neighbor had spotted a cloud of dust coming from the demolition site Monday morning.
“There are lot of upset parents talking about not sending their kids to school tomorrow,” John Coleman, whose son attends O’Keeffe, said Monday night. “It’s not clear the demolition was the cause, but there needs to be documentation about what was going on during that period.”
WISC-TV later reported that a child was seen on security cameras using pepper spray at the school. The Madison Fire Department’s hazardous materials team was called in and took air samples for testing, the station reported.
Coleman, who works in water quality testing, says the DOA project needs to be handled sensitively, because so much could go wrong.
“I try to maintain a naïve hopefulness about these sorts of projects. But my experience has been that there are always mistakes,” he says. “Mistakes when you’re right in the middle of a population center and in the middle of two lakes are inexcusable.”
He’s concerned about the lack of in-depth plans to control both dust and water runoff.
There are also concerns about the design of the new facility, says Anne Walker, a Marquette Neighborhood Association board member who lives about a block from the site. “My impression is it’s a nice pole barn, and I like pole barns,” Walker says. “But I’m not sure this is the right place for it.”
Mostly, residents are exasperated that they cannot get anyone from the state to answer questions about the project. Residents have set up a Facebook page as a clearinghouse for information on the project.
“There’s some who would really like to see it paused,” Walker says. “There should have been an opportunity for the neighborhood to comment. The state is an experienced developer. A project constructed in the heart of a neighborhood is one you’d want to have neighborhood input on.”
State Rep. Chris Taylor, whose Madison district includes the site, has been acting as a go-between for the state DOA.
Taylor says that DOA officials told her if they held a public meeting on this project, they would have to hold one for every project.
She wishes officials would simply meet with residents and answer their questions directly.
“It’s a good project that has some merit, but the way DOA has handled communications with the neighborhood has been horrible,” Taylor says. “They’ve refused to hold a community meeting. Every time a question arises, residents have to contact our office, and we have to contact the DOA, which is a really inefficient use of everybody’s time.”
Neither the DOA’s Cindy Torstveit, a facilities management administrator, nor spokesperson Tristan Cook returned calls from Isthmus for comment.
