By Kevin Boneske
Staff Writer
ASHWAUBENON – An Elkhorn company called in last summer to remove asbestos from the site where the Brown County Veterans Memorial Arena was demolished has reached a settlement in its lawsuit against the Village of Ashwaubenon.
After receiving a partial payment of $35,462, Balestrieri Environmental & Development claimed in a suit filed in February in Brown County Circuit Court it was still owed $326,308 by the village.
The settlement agreement directed the village to issue a check for $280,000 to the law firm representing Balestrieri.
The company’s project manager, Alex Balestrieri, appeared before the village board last September when he said the village contracted Balestrieri to do an emergency cleanup at the site related to asbestos abatement missed by the initial inspection of the arena.
Balestrieri said the demolition contractor, Veit, ended up demolishing some of the concrete rubble with asbestos into where the basement of the former Packers Hall of Fame was located.
“We were then asked to come and remove it,” he said. “The only issue is we couldn’t quantify it.”
In the information Balestrieri provided to the board, he noted the disposal rate for that material was calculated at $150 per cubic yard, the contracted price.
To determine how much the company should be paid, Balestrieri said that was based on the tonnage brought to the landfill and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency volume-to-weight standards for construction and demolition materials.
“We then did the math to figure out that we had roughly 1,640 yards, due to the fact that we knew about 85 percent of it was concrete and the other 15 percent of it was extra debris because it’s demolition,” he said.
Balestrieri said he was contacted Aug. 23 by Village Manager Allison Swanson, who disputed the amount of material hauled away by saying it was about half of what the company claimed.
The settlement agreement and release states the parties in the lawsuit reached a “compromise settlement of a disputed claim,” which is not to be considered “an admission of any liability, fault, or obligation whatsoever by any party or to any other person or entity.”