On Tuesday night a marked silence fell inside the chambers of the Champaign City Council meeting. Prior to this moment, the proceedings proved to be uneventful as Council members voted unanimously to approve all but one agenda item.

The last item before adjournment was the public comment session. After Mayor Schweighart invited comments from the audience, Claudia Lennhoff, executive director of Champaign County Healthcare Consumers addressed the council.

Lennhoff, there to speak on behalf of the 5th and Hill Neighborhood Rights Campaign, informed the Council about the Ameren Open House meeting that will take place at City Hall on Wednesday, March 11, 2009.

“I am here because we just read Ameren’s report last week. And there is some new and important – and I would say – some shocking information from our prospective,” she said.

Lennhoff was referring to an ongoing battle between residents of Champaign’s 5th and Hill neighborhood and the utility company Ameren. The neighborhood is located near the site of contaminated property owned by Ameren, according to Lennhoff.

“Ameren, for the first time—after all their reports and after all their testing – identified large sections of the property that pose a (health) threat because of vaporization from toxins.

This risk of exposure to poisonous substances has been “a long-standing concern” for 5th and Hill residents, Lennhoff said.

“Ameren found that the test results exceed the safety standards for residential property. In other words, if there was residential property there it would be unsafe (for people living near the site). Of course, there is residential property 40 or 50 feet away (from the site) and they didn’t test outside the boundaries of their (property). But there is no reason to think that the vaporization stops at the boundaries of the fenced-in area,” she said.

According to Lennhoff, the report also stated that “the ground water is far more contaminated than we had ever been told or led to believe.”

“One of the water test wells showed the presence of benzene, a highly toxic substance in the ground water. Now the safety standards are five parts per billion, in other words, you don’t want a test result that exceeds five parts per billion. Well, from Ameren’s on documents, the test results for that particular well show a 1000 parts per billion.”

Council members sat quietly as Lennhoff continued to build a case against Ameren, eventually highlighting the City’s ground water restriction ordinance passed in 2007,which she said, exempts Ameren form having to clean up the contaminated area.

“On the surface the ordinance seems benign. It basically prohibits people from putting in wells to (access) water for potable purposes. It is important to understand that the only thing this ordinance accomplishes for the people of the City of Champaign is that it prohibits them from drinking contaminated water, which they have not been doing.”

The ordinance only protects people from exposure to toxins if they drink the water. “However, that is only one of three ways that people can be exposed,” she said. The other ways include “touching or tactile exposure and inhalation.”

“This ordinance only addresses one pathway for exposure – the ingestion pathway, which really has not been an issue because residents were not digging wells for drinking water and they were not hauling water in buckets from their flooded basements for drinking purposes. The ordinance does not prevent (contaminated) water from flooding their basements or from flowing into Boneyard Creek, or onto other people’s properties.”

Lennhoff said that the city ordinance allows Ameren to get away with not cleaning up the toxins because it claims that it is using the suing the ordinance to address the issue.

Regarding the ordinance Lenhhoff stated, “This is what amounts to an administrative slight of hand that allows Ameren to have the appearance that it is addressing contaminated ground water.”

Lennhoff hopes that the City Council members will not only attend Ameren’s open house meeting, but will also amend the ordinance that she said is allowing Ameren to avoid cleaning up toxins that are located in the 5th and Hill neighborhood.
In other Council news, the executive director of the Boys and Girls Club and 7 of program participants, presented Council members with commemorative plates as a token of appreciation for financial support.

Ideas for stories:
1. Cover the Ameren Open House Meeting
2. Follow up interview with Claudia Lennhoff
3. Interview Council members regarding Ameren issue