Jun. 2—KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A federal judge has fined a project manager from Iowa $40,000 for misleading the federal government regarding lead contamination in Granby's city park.

U.S. Chief District Judge Beth Phillips sentenced Lynn Eich, 65, of DeWitt, Iowa, to five years of probation in addition to the fine at a hearing Thursday in federal court in Kansas City. Eich had pleaded guilty in July of last year to making a false statement relating to a federal environmental cleanup contract.

The defendant was the project manager on a soil cleanup project in Newton County for which his employer, Environmental Quality Management, had been awarded a contract by the Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency totaling almost $12 million.

The project targeted mine waste at a Superfund site in and around Granby where the soil had been contaminated with lead from past mining and smelting operations. The goal was to remove contaminated soil and backfill the affected areas with clean soil, including Granby City Park.

When the company was awarded another EPA contract for a similar but larger project in Oronogo, Eich sought to switch the Newton County project's quality control manager to the Oronogo job and replace them with another manager on the Newton County job.

The U.S. attorney's office in Kansas City said in a news release Friday that Eich misrepresented to the Corps of Engineers that the replacement manager had comparable experience and was qualified for the job when they actually had "little to no experience testing soil for hazardous materials."

Between Sept. 12 and Oct. 19, 2016, the quality control manager he put on the job in Newton County failed to properly test fill material used in Granby City Park. The U.S. attorney's office said Eich was made aware of it in October 2016 when the site superintendent received soil analyses lead levels in the fill well in excess of the contractual requirement of 100 mg/kg. But the results of those analyses were not reported to the EPA or Corps of Engineers.

Eich did call the Corps in June 2018 to report "a hot spot" in the park but misrepresented its scope to be less than 1,000 cubic yards when the contamination was actually pervasive throughout the park, the U.S. attorney's office said.

The EPA discovered the true extent of the contamination when it conducted its own tests, and another contractor was hired to do the work, which was completed in June 2021 at additional cost to the government agency.

Environmental Quality Management since has paid more than $2 million in restitution to the federal government in the form of two settlements of civil lawsuits reached on violations of federal laws.