LTE – Tom Aebly – 7-4-2018

Dear Editor,

I would like to pose a question that has bothered me for some time: is it the right of a contractor, who works on your property, to remove as much of your topsoil as he can, leave the landowner with exposed clay, and not compensate the landowner?

Recently they built the Family Dollar store in Glenwood. The first thing they appeared to do was scrape the topsoil off and build it into a great mound of black topsoil. When the job was done the contractor removed that mound of dirt.

In New Richmond where 165 and 164 meet (the traffic light on 164). There is a new building, and they mounded the topsoil.

I drive along 194 and see places where the topsoil has slid down, exposing the claysoil.

In 2005, when my house burned down, the contractor mounded up my topsoil and began removing it. I caught him, but not before he had removed a good deal of my topsoil.

My family moved into Glenwood City in 1963. An initiative was started soon after – to relandscape properties on the west side of Syme Avenue. They removed the small hill, that used to be between our house and the dry run, all the trees and up to about 24 inches of rich black topsoil from our land and the neighbor’s land. Now there is only clay. To my knowledge, no landowner received any compensation for the topsoil.

When they built the duplexes, on some of that land, they had to haul in quite a bit of fill – to replace the topsoil that had been removed.

I will admit that, for a large fee, the contractor will install sod. But sod will slide on a hillside if it is not pegged down, especially if it is claysoil.

Am I the only one who sees this as theft?

Tom Aebly