Plymouth City Attorney Sean Surrisi gave an update to the Plymouth Redevelopment Commission Tuesday night on the activity on the corner of Jefferson and Michigan Streets.
Stone Excavating recently demolished the old building there that formerly housed a Subway restaurant and a fireworks retail store. Even before that, the site was home to a gas station and work has been done to ensure that the area is officially cleared by the Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM). Surrisi previously noted that the gas tanks were removed in the late 1980s.
Surrisi said following the demolition of the building, an environmental company that the State engaged to do the environmental testing of the property came back on the site and conducted soil testing and will be doing some water testing.
“We’ll wait for the final results from all of those tests to see if there is any more remedial work,” commented Surrisi. “Again, the property got put into a state program called the Petroleum Orphan Sites program. It’s for sites that have been forgotten about that have never been cleared from IDEM’s list of properties that need to be cleared. The State agreed to take it in and they pay for all of the assessment and any remediation. All we had to do was give them permission to access the property. That was a great deal for the city.”
Once it is cleared, the Plymouth Street Department will put down soil and grass seed until a long-term plan can be funded. There was a plan to put a pocket park or plaza there to commemorate the major highways that intersect at that location – Lincoln Highway, Michigan Road, Yellowstone Trail and Dixie Highway. It was once a Marshall County Crossroads Stellar project, but INDOT would not fund the project.
