A decades-old dump with more than 80,000 tires is finally getting cleaned up

For decades, property owners at a one-time government radar base just northeast of Rochester collected thousands of tires hoping to turn it into a business. What they created was a tire dump.

Now Olmsted County officials think it will take about three months to clear the more than 80,000 tires from the site.

After more than seven years, the Haverhill Township tire dump will finally get rid of the tractor tires, car tires, bicycle tires, even shredded tires that have been around since the 1970s, turning what at one time was a former airfield back into developable property.

"We are very pleased about the whole situation," Haverhill Township Board Chair Paul Uecker said.

The property, nestled among farmland along a dirt road at 70th Avenue NE., has been a concern for local and state officials since the 1990s. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) sent letters to property owners ordering them to clean up the site, citing the tires and other waste ranging from lead paint to office supplies.

At one point around 1997, it looked as though the MPCA planned to seize the site, though nothing came of that.

The family who owned the 22-acre parcel bought it in the 1940s. It served as a radar-monitoring base in the 1950s, then as a juvenile detention center. The owners started collecting tires and other waste, hoping to resell or recycle it. And at one point in the 1990s the owners rented out makeshift barracks for residents, though the rental proposal appeared to be short-lived.

"Nobody was probably aware it was there, just because you can't see it from the roads," Township Board Vice-Chair Ben Hain said.

The site had fallen into disrepair at the same time the owners fell behind on their property taxes. Olmsted County seized the property as a tax forfeiture in 2017, beginning a years-long effort to clear it, according to Mat Miller, Olmsted County's director of public facilities and planning.

The cleanup was slow going before last year. Miller said the barracks had to be removed after county officials found a meth lab inside one of them, while other hazardous materials had to be removed in short order.

"A lot of it was trying to figure out where do we start?" Miller said.

County commissioners turned to local lawmakers, who secured $550,000 in MPCA funding during the 2024 session for the project.

The county contracted out arguably its biggest obstacle earlier this month to a company that plans to remove all the tires on the site by the end of June. County officials estimated about 80,000 tires in six large piles through drone surveillance, though Miller said likely more will turn up.

Those tires will be given to a Wisconsin-based recycler, Miller said.

Another contract will go out later this summer to demolish a hangar, shed, and other buildings on the property. Miller said previous environmental assessments showed no underground pollution to clean up, though it's possible surprise issues could show up as workers clear the site.

The property will likely be up for sale by this time next year, though it's unclear how it will be used. County officials have reached out to a nearby solar garden that bought part of the property a few years ago to see if the owners are interested in expanding, though the Olmsted County Board has final say over how the property will be used.

Residents in the township of about 1,600 people say they're happy the property will be put to good use. Hain remembers playing softball on the property, while the farm shop and buildings used to be used as a training center and mechanic space for the local Boys and Girls Club.

Hain also found references in his late grandmother's diaries that the site was at one point one of three possible locations for an airport in town, before the Rochester International Airport was built farther south.

"Boy, that would've changed the neighborhood," Hain said.