Now that St. Joseph County has built a new highway garage in Granger, county commissioners will consider hiring a firm to make sure it doesn’t pollute the area’s groundwater.
The county has built the new highway garage on Alexander Drive. That’s an industrial area but it’s across Bittersweet Road from the Timberline Trace subdivision.
The facility will store highway department vehicles, road salt and fuel. It replaces a garage on Cleveland Road, east of the Toll Road, where chemicals leached into groundwater and contaminated wells in the nearby Juday Creek Estates. The county has supplied affected homes there with reverse osmosis systems and bottled water.
Commissioners chose the Alexander Drive site after Anderson Road residents, fearing a repeat of what happened on Cleveland Road, vehemently opposed their initial plan in 2023 to build it on county parks department land near Anderson and Beech roads.
On Tuesday commissioners planned to vote on a contract with Goshen-based Roberts Environmental to monitor the Alexander Drive site’s groundwater. The county would pay the firm up to $44,600 to run quarterly tests on 10 monitoring wells that were installed during construction. Testing could become less frequent if no problems appear after the first year.
