30 Acres of Closed Park Space I have a habit of requesting public records and posting them on line and I apologize for hyping the Brook Run Park asbestos cleanup without completing the story.
As a reminder, Brook Run is a 102 acre park in Dunwoody where DeKalb County contracted to have five abandoned buildings removed at a cost of 1.3 million dollars. Towards the end of the project, additional asbestos was “discovered” and the cost of the project jumped by an additional $500,000 dollars. I have made several open record requests regarding this property and it is my belief that this project has been mismanaged and financial games have been played. The county’s response to my open records requests have varied between extremely unresponsive (they flat out lied to me once stating that there were no records available and then were caught in the bold faced lie with the $500,000 extension happening the next week) to bending over backward to assist me. This time the response was very good.
Mr. Dave Butler, the Environmental Manager for the DeKalb Parks Department whom I have known and talked to in the past, cooperated fully by providing everything I asked for in order to assist me in verifying that the County has done the proper due diligence as it relates to cleaning up the Brook Run property. Mr. Butler provided the hundreds of waste manifests proving the movement of the concrete to the landfill, internal e-mails, maps /drawings and the check list which states that the Brook Run project is now complete.
In an e-mail to me regarding the possible burying of asbestos, Mr. Butler gave me his personal account of the asbestos removal.
During removal of the Therapy Building foundation and subsequent grading of the site, I made twice weekly inspections of the work, the environmental inspector from Planning and Development made weekly inspections, and the Georgia Environmental Protection Division (EPD) visited the site several times. There was no evidence of demolition debris buried on site. The remaining fragments of stone, brick, or concrete that you may see on the surface were left behind after loading out the stockpiles of debris.The link below contains a good portion of the records (except for the waste manifests) and the final project checklist which shows that everything has been completed in the park.
With that being said, I believe the back of Brook Run Park is still closed. Why?? The work is done and there are 30 acres of beautiful park land waiting to be explored, why is it still closed?
If anybody finds out, please let me know, I have been asking that same question for months.
Oh, and if you happen to talk to the DeKalb County Parks Department, please ask them when the benches for the Children’s playground are scheduled to arrive? I have been asking that question for years.
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