BEATRICE - The good news for the City of Beatrice is that it will not have to monitor an environmental cleanup site forever. The bad news is that it may seem like it.

The Beatrice City Council Monday night approved an amended agreement with State Environmental officials to monitor the site of a former manufactured gas plant, until the year 2050. The plant formerly was located near 1st and Market Streets. City Administrator Tobias Tempelmeyer says the city and Centel were owners of the site that was cleaned up more than two years ago.

"When it became time to negotiate the final settlement with Centel, we noticed there was an issue with the existing covenants we had agreed to, with the state".
The covenants stated that the monitoring would last forever.

Tempelmeyer said, "that's a hard number to value in the first place, but it gets to be a very big number. Centel wanted to go with the industry standard, which was thirty years. We agreed to go back to the state and ask them to amend the covenants, to require us to monitor the site for thirty years". The city council approved the amended agreement on a 7-0 vote.

Cleanup of the site, which was the subject of lawsuits and challenges, initially cost the city about two-million dollars….but the city received reimbursement for part of that amount from another company and an engineering firm.

Centel was responsible for 75% of the overall site cleanup cost, while the City of Beatrice share was 25%. The cleanup included area along the river, but also underneath and east of nearby railroad tracks that extend through the area.

Federal and State environmental officials said the site’s soil and groundwater was contaminated by cyanide, metals, petroleum hydrocarbons and gasoline additives, from a manufactured gas plant that operated in the early 1900s. The contamination was discovered back in 2004.

The site is now green space and trees, along the Big Blue River.