A popular Jacksonville restaurant is being forced to move according to its owners because of property damage and contamination.
A new location for Taco Gringo is currently under construction in the 1100 block of West Morton Avenue, next door to the new Starbucks. It’s current location at 501 South Main has been in operation for more than 40 years, and has been a staple restaurant for Jacksonville. According to owner Jim Mizeur, it was the original store started by his father for a franchise that now has 5 other locations: 4 in Springfield and one in Taylorville.
Mizeur says that when Ameren-Illinois began remediation of the Anna Street Remote Gas Holder site, it caused massive problems for his business and the property: “Once they started the clean up site, we saw ourselves, I’m going to say 50% diminished – meaning as they were working on that project for a year or a little more, what they did was besides the structure of our building underneath, our plumbing, our floors, our tile, the foundation even has just been cracking, dropping, and sinking since they started this near our building. What they’ve done is destroyed our sales. Our customer accounts dropped tremendously. It’s been like black & white between 2020 and then after the project. We’ve somewhat bounced back in 2023. Customers were coming there during the clean up, and while Ameren was continuing their clean up, it was damaging customer cars in the drive-thru at the rear of our building. They were blowing this white, foamy stuff all over while cars were trying to order in the drive-thru. They were overtaking all of our parking lots with their job site and it all just dropped our customer sales tremendously.”
Mizeur says the problems have persisted since Ameren completed the project, as he’s noticed continued subsidence in the building and believes that contamination of the property’s soil remains. Mizeur employed a private company to test any lateral movement of toxic materials towards his property.
The site’s coal gasification plant was known for production of coke gas, and stopped production around 1932. Coke gas went out of common use as a fuel for electricity production in the early 1930s after environmental damage from beehive coke ovens in Pennsylvania drew national attention. It was eventually replaced by natural gas and more coal usage. Wastewater from coking is highly toxic and carcinogenic.
Ameren-Illinois enrolled the former coke gas site at 101 and 221 Anna Street in the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency Site Remediation Program in early 2021. Work commenced in April and lasted for over a year. Dave Palmer, Ameren-Illinois lead engineer on the project at the time said in March 2021 that work would involve soil compaction and would have little effect on neighboring properties. The impacted soil remediation, he said, would take place at depths 55 feet below the surface. Palmer also said in the March 2021 interview with WLDS that Ameren had taken vapor samples in the vicinity of neighboring properties, including the Taco Gringo site and could “find no signs of chemicals in the subsurface.” Palmer reiterated that fact in a follow up interview after remediation was near completion in April 2022. According to an online LinkedIn profile, Palmer left Ameren-Illinois for a private company earlier this month.
Ameren completed remediation of the site in June 2022 and was asked by the City of Jacksonville to remediate and Anna and West Streets due to the damage done by heavy machinery. Ameren paid a little less than $600,000 for the roadwork and utility repairs that accumulated. According to testimony given to the Illinois Commerce Commission, the cost to remediate the Jacksonville site was over $11.3 million.
Mizeur employed Rapps Engineering to do their own testing of soil on the Taco Gringo site and refuted most of Palmer’s claims in March 2021.
Mike Rapps, principal engineer says that no one really knows just how far the carcinogenic chemicals seeped from the Anna Street site: “We don’t really know the full extent in a lateral sense. We only know where there has been investigation. There’s very little investigation to the east. The investigation to the west and southwest was probably more extensive than people thought. It’s hard to say what has happened at depth, meaning if you put down soil borings, let’s say for 30-40 feet and stop at that point, has it gone much further than that? I can’t tell the full extent. I don’t think anyone knows actually.”
Rapps says that the chemicals are mostly coal tar related. The City of Taylorville and the City of Springfield have both seen massive lawsuits involving either city-related utilities or the former CIPS-owned utility sites in the last decade due to coal bi-product contamination. Ameren-Illinois has voluntarily remediated over 50 sites around the state surrounding former coke gas plants or coil oil locations.
Rapps says he’s unsure of any health, life, safety concerns right now at the South Main Street site but he says there is another factor that figures into problems for local property owners in the area around the Anna Street site: “For the most part, I think the concentrations [of hazardous material] is relatively low at distance probably where they entered the soil and groundwater. Once again, we don’t know how far they’ve gone in the depth of the soil and so forth. That’s only one question – the health impact. The other one is economic impact and are people’s properties damaged to the point that they can’t sell it, that they no longer have value in the marketplace. Many buyers would be reluctant to purchase properties that had some of those materials come onto the property that raise questions.”
Rapps says that there are too many unknowns to the east of the Anna Street site. He can’t be sure if coal tar bi-products are further east and across the road or even continuing to effect the Town Brook’s water. He says there’s simply been no investigation of it to his knowledge: “As far as the Taco Gringo property goes, there really hasn’t been much investigation on site. There has only been one soil boring done on the Taco Gringo property. Some soil gas samples were taken. We found information earlier worked up by probably Illinois Power where that we got coal tar on the property. There’s been limited investigation. If you go farther east on the other side of Main Street, it’s hard to say where that goes because it hasn’t been looked into. There’s been limited investigation into that area.”
Rapps says property owners in the vicinity might have a difficult time selling their property simply because of the unknowns surrounding how far these chemicals may have leaked. He says that banks may perform their own investigation to see if a property is even sellable.
In Rapps’ report filed in 2021, he noted that the shallow dirt from boring taken on the property had high levels of cyanide and that evidence of coal tar residue had been observed on the property since 1995. Later ground water samples in 2018 showed components of coal tar in an organized fashion on the restaurant’s property, possibly outlining a larger plume.
Rapps’ report says that the State of Illinois does not have a standard for chemical contamination in soil for levels of acceptability, nor is there a statewide groundwater regulation for a vast majority of materials used in society. Despite that, the Illinois EPA uses a system ironically called TACO. Tiered Approach to Corrective Action Objectives, or TACO sets remediation objectives that are meant to protect human health by taking into account site conditions and land use. The three-tiered system contains a list of compounds and their limits on how much can appear in soil and groundwater.
Rapps conclusion about the readings from the Taco Gringo site says that the readings found of the dangerous compounds found on the site exceed the first teir’s level of acceptability for ingestion or inhalation.
Mizeur has hired legal counsel and has placed a claim. In documents presented to WLDS News, Taco Gringo’s counsel Levenfield Pearlstein, LLC of Chicago corresponded with Ameren-Illinois back in May to seek some sort of remediation or resolution. Mizeur says that he nor his lawyers have received a response.
WLDS News contacted Ameren-Illinois seeking comment. Ameren representatives say they are unable to respond due to an active claim.
WLDS News contacted members of the Illinois EPA and received confirmation that the site is being looked at but no further response has been given at this time.
Mizeur wants to ensure the public that it is still safe to eat at the restaurant while its in operation at the South Main location, as they have taken great care to continue their many years of service to the community both safely and at that quality their long-time customers have always expected.