County plans meeting on Granger highway garage as neighbors' concerns grow

GRANGER — With a public meeting set to hear their concerns on April 27, neighbors have found more reasons to oppose the highway garage that county officials propose building at the corner of a future park on Anderson Road.

But some county officials are still hoping they can forge ahead with the project.

Neighbors point to a state inspection in March that found violations in the county highway garage that the new garage would replace on Cleveland Road near the Indiana Toll Road.

March 20, 2023: Neighbors concerned for groundwater if garage built with Anderson Road park

And they recently discovered a change that county officials quietly passed last fall that would allow the garage in a residentially zoned area as long as it gets a special permit. Neighbors are suspicious because they weren’t directly notified.

Neighbors say they’ve collected more than 1,000 signatures in a petition against the garage that would be built on seven acres near Beech Road, at the corner of a long-awaited county park.

Meeting scheduled to hear objections

County commissioners have arranged a public meeting to answer their questions and concerns at 6 p.m. April 27 at Granger Missionary Church, 50841 Birch Road, Granger. There’s an online Zoom link, too, linked in this story online, for those who cannot be there.

Officials plan to give a presentation about the project and address the issues that the public has raised. Questions can be posed at the meeting and in advance at sjccom@sjcindiana.com. County officials also plan to post at the county's website, www.sjcindiana.com, a grid of answers to questions that had already been emailed.

Update: County releases answers to questions on Anderson Road garage in Granger

Dan Schaetzle, the county council member who represents the district where the garage would be built, told neighbors at last week's commissioners meeting that, after listening to the county engineer and other experts, he believes “that we have a solid plan” for storing and distributing salt and fuel that won’t contaminate the groundwater.

“We ask you to come and listen," Schaetzle said of the April 27 meeting. “We will listen to you as we have. … I’m asking you to come listen to the plan and then give us your honest opinion. And if it hasn’t changed, you’ll tell us that. And if you look at it and say, ‘You know, there are parts of this I didn’t understand and I think they’re solid,’ I hope you have the courage to tell me that as well.”

But, as badly as Granger residents have wanted the park, neighbor Emily Trausch told commissioners, “Many of us are completely fine without a park if the garage does not get built.”

September 2022: New Granger county park could emerge from highway garage deal

The project hinges on the St. Joseph County Parks board signing on to an agreement with the county for use of the seven-acre parcel for a garage, which is still undecided. The land is part of 115 acres that the parks board owns, having bought it in 1999 for eventual use as a park. And parks board President Larry Catanzarite has said, “I’m not signing this until we get everything cleared up.”

In March, the county council and commissioners approved $1 million of pandemic American Rescue Plan dollars to build the satellite garage. Creation of the park on Anderson would be financed at a later time with a park bond.

So far, neighbors’ worries haven’t been eased by the county’s fail-safe plans to protect the groundwater — at just four to seven feet below the surface — from potential salt and fuel spills.

County Engineer Sky Medors has said salt would be kept inside of a building and loaded onto trucks over a concrete pad. Fuel would be stored above ground in a tank with a double wall and automatic shutoff valve in case of a leak. Soil would be built up underneath the fueling pad. And there’d be an oil-water separator underground.

All of that is required by the Indiana Department of Environmental Management.

IDEM reports violations at Cleveland garage

IDEM inspected the Cleveland garage on March 21 and found a series of violations. Among them, the garage’s two “spill buckets” were both “broken and would not function as designed in a spill/overfill event,” the inspection report states. Spill buckets are devices that contain drips and spills at the surface where the tank is filled.

“Cracked spill buckets are a common violation, but we do not keep statistics on it,” IDEM spokesman Barry Sneed told The Tribune. “Any amount of fuel lost would be minor compared to a tank or piping failure.”

Also, the garage lacked the required “operator training certificates.”

“The operator training certificates are required and demonstrate that site managers are aware of the various hazards that exist at a UST (underground storage tank) site and how to react to emergency situations,” Sneed said. “However, the lack of one does not impact day-to-day operations.”

Also, the garage lacked documentation of monthly or annual walk-through inspections. And it didn’t have an annual inspection of the underground tank leak detection system.

In a letter sent April 6, IDEM told the county that it had 30 days to correct the violations.

Asked about the violations, Medors said his department started talking with IDEM about corrective measures right away. Without being specific, he said, “We’re on it.”

The last time IDEM inspected the garage, in 2018, it lacked monthly leak detection tests, among other violations. IDEM reports show that the garage eventually complied.

When asked if ongoing issues are part of the reason why the county wants to close this garage, Medors said he wasn’t allowed to say any more. He deferred questions to the April 27 meeting. Earlier this year, he did say that the Cleveland garage was in need of repair. It would be demolished if a new garage is built.

Garage had salt issues in the past

In a story in The Tribune in 2016, county officials were already talking about closing the Cleveland garage. Built in 1975, the garage had stored road salt in the open air, with no pad underneath, until 1986. Salt leached into the groundwater and, in 1989, residents of the nearby Juday Creek Estates subdivision found chloride in their water, The Tribune reported.

April 2016: Well contamination problem resurfaces at Granger subdivision

The county inserted a pump to divert the salted water while it also tested the wells and provided bottled water to about a dozen affected homes, according to the story. Then, in 1992, a consultant declared the wells free of chlorides.

After 1986, the salt was stored inside of a barn. But in 2014, the county again found chloride in 12 wells in the subdivision. That time, a county health official told The Tribune, the contamination may have come from salt that highway workers failed to sweep up as they loaded and unloaded trucks.

“Why are we risking the health of the Granger community when we have a terrible history with salt garages?” Trausch said. “What would change with the way the Anderson garage would be maintained?”

Quietly dealing with the zoning issue

In November, county planners took a step to ease the process in case the county does get the OK to move ahead with the garage.

Planners brought forth a measure that would add highway garages to the list of special uses that could be permitted in an area that’s zoned residentially as a single family district, like the Anderson site is. It would avoid having to rezone land to a district that isn’t suitable for the area, planner Shawn Klein wrote to county officials. But such a garage would still need to be reviewed and approved by the county’s Area Board of Zoning Appeals and the county council.

The county council and commissioners approved the measure. It never caught the attention of neighbors or the news media.

After he became aware of it, neighbor Nate Kelly said, he dug through public notices to see if or how the public was notified. All he found was a legal ad in The Tribune for the council public hearing in November. But the few words about the special-use measure were jammed between a lot of other text about other bills and budgets.

Kelly said it felt as though officials were keeping it hidden from neighbors. Trausch likewise felt in the dark, saying, “This is changing the rules to suit your needs.”

Apart from the highway garage, it doesn’t help that Granger residents have had to deal with other, unrelated issues with their wells as housing has grown.

“Things are leaking into the wells already,” neighbor Stacia Skillman told commissioners. “Now I’m not rich. I don’t have an RO (reverse osmosis) system. I don’t have any kind of special water except the thing that most people drink. That’s what I shower in, that’s what I feed my animals, and that’s what I feed my children. That’s the coffee I drink every day.”

South Bend Tribune reporter Joseph Dits can be reached at 574-235-6158 or jdits@sbtinfo.com.

This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: Granger county highway garage worries Anderson Road neighbors