dnr surveillance cfi 1981

Major Release of Connor Forest Industries DNR Docs to Public


City now says it will not do the environmental studies on the former Connor property it told the community it would do earlier this year. Mayor calls concerns about past Connor contamination “much ado about nothing.”

Connor Forest Industries (CFI), at 131 W Thomas Street and along Cleveland Avenue in Wausau, was a known dump and buried waste site that at one point found itself under covert surveillance by the Department of Natural Resources (DNR). The City of Wausau had recently planned to explore residential development on the former CFI property, but was alerted to the property’s history by a Citizens for a Clean (CCW) Wausau volunteer.

In a recent radio interview with Mayor Robert Mielke on WXCO, the mayor now states that the City will not perform additional environmental studies on the former CFI property, even though earlier this year it communicated to the public that it would do so. Statements about the concerns being “much ado about nothing” occur at roughly 8 minutes and 58 seconds in the radio interview.

It was ultimately discovered decades ago by state regulators that CFI had buried waste at multiple sites throughout Wisconsin.

A series of open records requests by a Citizens for a Clean Wausau volunteer led to the acquisition of reams of documents about Connor Forest Industries contamination in Wausau and elsewhere. Those documents from the records request had to be initially viewed at the DNR’s central office in Madison. The DNR later provided those documents on a disc — a CCW thank you to the department for its assistance in locating these records and for providing digital copies.

PDFs of DNR records on Connor Forest Industries in Wausau — many of which have never been viewed by the general public or been uploaded to the DNR BRRTS website — can now be downloaded from the zip file below. The files are numerous and are in a PDF format.

https://www.cleanwausau.com/CFI-DNR-Docs.zip

This is the third post in a series on the former Connor Forest Industries property in Wausau.