Mentor Marsh: Ohio releases $10.8 million for salt pollution cleanup, restoration project

State earmarks $10.8 million for cleanup, restoration of salt pollution at Mentor Marsh

The Mentor Marsh State Nature Preserve is located adjacent to a nine-acre site polluted by salt that is scheduled for a $10.8 million clean-up and restoration project financed by the Osborne Companies.

MENTOR, Ohio – The state controlling board on Tuesday released $10.8 million earmarked for the cleanup and restoration of the Mentor Marsh, which has been devastated by salt pollution over the past 50 years.

The five-year remediation project was made possible by the settlement of a lawsuit brought by the Ohio EPA against the estate of the late developer Jerome Osborne, whose companies were responsible for the salt runoff at a 9-acre site adjacent to the marsh.

The newly created Marsh Restoration Fund consists of $10.6 million from the Osborne companies, and $250,000 in state funds for engineering, design and planning for the marsh remediation, said State Rep. John Rogers, a Democrat from Mentor-on-the-Lake.

“This is just the beginning of the efforts toward restoring this area of the marsh and ensuring this beautiful community asset lives on for future generations,” Rogers said in a prepared release.

The Cleveland Museum of Natural History acquired the marsh in 1965 and established it as the state’s first nature preserve in 1971. Prior to that time, the marsh had served as a breeding area for Lake Erie fish and as a rest stop for migrating ducks, geese and songbirds.

But in 1966, Osborne Concrete and Stone sent salt pollution pouring into Blackbrook Creek, poisoning the pristine marsh and destroying trees, vegetation, fish and animals in the 691-acre Mentor Marsh preserve.

By the early 1970s, the marsh was choked by reed grass called phragmites, an invasive, salt-tolerant plant that formed an impenetrable wall of vegetation across the 4-mile-long marsh basin, and which periodically caught fire, threatening nearby neighborhoods.

Under terms of the lawsuit settlement agreement, Osborne Concrete and Stone, a family trust, and Lakeshore Boulevard Properties, which is owned by the trust and has title to the property, will pay to remove hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of polluted soil from the acreage adjacent to the marsh. The defendants also will be required to eliminate ongoing pollution to the marsh, the Grand River, Blackbrook Creek and Lake Erie.

During the restoration, the land will be held in the custody of the Lake County Land Reutilization Corp., a non-profit land bank, with the expectation that it will eventually be sold for $1 to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

Mentor Marsh State Nature Preserve

The Mentor Marsh State Nature Preserve is located adjacent to a nine-acre site polluted by salt that is scheduled for a $10.8 million clean-up and restoration project.

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