FORT WAYNE, Ind. (WOWO): The environmental reports on the North River property, also known as the former OmniSource scrap yard, have gone public. The nearly 2,000 pages of assessment reports were released Monday.

The owners of the property refused to share the 2007 environmental study on the land unless Fort Wayne City Council approved the proposal to buy the property first.

In a 5-3 vote, with City Councilman Michael Barranda abstaining, Council did approve the deal to buy the 29-acre parcel of land for $4.63-million, while also assuming responsibility for all environmental clean up costs.

RELATED: City Council approves controversial land deal

Councilman Barranda tells WOWO News, the environmental report points to several issues. One of them being a major problem with the soil.

“I think that this at minimum confirmed the worst of what we already knew which was the entire top layer of soil is contaminated with metals. Arsenic, cadmium, mercury and lead. We knew that and we knew that we were going to have to remove about 20 acres of dirt off the top.”

He says he is hearing a quarter of a million dollars will be the cost to clear that top layer of soil. However, that is the minimum cost estimate. Meanwhile, another problem discovered was some groundwater contamination.

“The point of this particular testing was to try and test for the specific metals that they did find. I don’t know how much underground water contamination could or would potentially have gone into the St. Mary’s River they didn’t test for that, but they know there was some groundwater contamination and they do know that it would eventually flow towards the St. Mary’s River.”

The land sits between Clinton, Fourth and Harrison Streets. The site was previously used as a rail yard, an oil company and a scrap yard beginning in 1902, but has not been actively used since 2006.

The report also indicated that four spill incidents occurred on the property between 1989 and 2002 and no documentation of cleanups were readily available.

“It’s to the level of absurdity and I can almost laugh if it weren’t for the fact that taxpayers are on the hook for this….Because we know have it in our hands… less than a week after we voted on it and it really speaks to the absurdity of the Rifkin family did with the city and negating this saying we aren’t going to let city council see this even though everyone is going to see it a week later… and so when you talk about something that passes the smell test or not they did not want, they literally did not want us to see it when we voted on it.”

The environmental study did not specify the cost to clean up the entire property.