For months Benzie County Commissioners received phone calls about a junkyard along one Northern Michigan Road. The junkyard in question was no longer in business, but the junk remained. In the last couple of days, those calls have been coming to the newsroom. The callers didn't want to know about the mess, but rather the transformation that seemed to be taking place. Those callers had a lot of question of what's being done, and whose paying for it. The details I found for them are the subject of this Fact Finder.

When Mark Ropper describes the scene at the former 669 Salvage Yard in Benzie County you get the feeling he knew his work was cut out for him. "Pretty much just piles everywhere, looked like a disaster zone. It just kind of took your breath away. It's just overwhelming how much stuff was here." says Ropper.

About a year ago the 669 Salvage Yard was out of business and more than 30 years of unwanted mobile homes, boats, scrap, thousands of tires, and junk was everywhere. Ropper says "it was very very difficult to walk through here just to plain walk through here it was hard to do without stepping on something."

And what you didn't have to worry about stepping on, you saw driving by. Ropper a Benzie County Commissioner says "The mobile home situation was tough to take and look at. It really made it look worse than it looked before so we had 12 mobile homes here that had been partially stripped. Some had flattened and so that made the situation that much worse."

A salvage yard full of everything that nobody wanted anymore, and then the property itself followed suit. The junkyard closed, and then according to Linda Wilson, the Benzie County Treasurer," the county becomes owners of it through tax foreclosure. The property taxes were not paid then we go through the process of auctioning off. Nobody purchased the property at the auctions and so the county took possession of it. The local government did not want it and so the county was left with possession of it."

So the county due to the foreclosure became responsible for the land, the junk, and the environmental concerns the DEQ had identified over the years. Wilson says "I think when the county took possession of it we knew we were going to do something about it. How we were going to do it we didn't know. We've looked at the tax law and through the tax law there is the tax auction proceeds become available to the county after 2 years and right now we are functioning with the 2006 2007 auction proceeds to cover the cost of this."

So how much money does Benzie County have from those two years of foreclosure auctions? According to Wilson "right now we have about $100,000 for 2006 tax auction proceeds was around $46,000, 2007 auction proceeds around $64,000 so the board of commissioners voted to put the money into a land reutilization fund to be able to fund projects like this."

That's when Mark Ropper says the County Commissioners decided "to be part of something where we are trying to do something good for the community make things right by the local residents that live around here, is a positive feeling for myself and the other commissioners who have agreed "let's spend the money and get this done."

So they are. The county is spending as much of that $100,000 as it takes to reach their immediate goal which Ropper describes as "to be down to where we can come in and have some hand work and basically pick up the last few remaining items and clean the surface of the property, so that the surface can basically get back to something that is presentable, that we could cover back up with grass seed and make it look good again."

So for the past week they have been pushing, scrapping and hauling and according to Ropper "We've moved in here and done quite a lot in a short period of time."

But not everything that leaves this salvage yard will to go another. A DEQ grant will actually cover the removal of thousands of scrap tires. Those will be recycled in July, but junk being hauled away today could also find a new use. Ropper says "This waste will go the transfer station in Traverse City where it is semi sorted and then transferred to Kalkaska were approximately 70 to 75% of it will be reutilized recycled and it will be put back into use in some way or form. About 15% will end up back in a landfill."

Now the surface cleaning is just that. There are still monitoring wells on the property, and items that are buried. The county admits, it may still have a tough time selling the property, but at least, the problem isn't getting worse. They say hopefully this time next year, you would have no idea a salvage yard was ever there.

So what do you think about the use in this case? Money well spent? Shouldn't be the county's responsibility? I want to hear from you.

Please leave your comments below.