Southfield Officials Denied a Toxic-Soil Report Existed, But We Found It

The mayor of Southfield is something unique in the animal kingdom: a weasel who walks on two legs.

I say this because Mayor Ken Siver has presided over the mass poisoning of his city. It’s been going on for a decade and, now cornered, Hizzoner lies about it. He tells his citizens they are safe when they are not.

Siver tells the public that the mountains of poisoned dirt at the old Northland Mall site, which are blowing directly into their homes, are not super-contaminated with heavy metals and volatile compounds when they actually are.

When we broke the story last year, Siver posted an FAQ response on the city’s website. He assured the public the dirt wasn’t toxic, because his “experts” told him it didn’t look or smell contaminated.

As if you can smell PCBs!

It all broke loose after Detroit authorities discovered that the toxic Northland dirt had been illegally transported to Detroit and dumped into demolition holes there. Test results showed the stuff contained toxins at levels too dangerous for human contact.

You’d figure that a mayor hearing something like that would want to get to the bottom of things. Not Siver. When I reached him by telephone, the weasel got squirrely. His voice grew shrill. He peppered me with salty insults.

“You’re a sensationalist. You twist things. You have trouble with the truth,” he whined. “I wouldn’t know about that dirt. I was told it was clean. Where’s your proof?”

The Detroit test results should have been enough. They weren’t for Siver.

I was told about a massive 2021 environmental report prepared ahead of the city’s sale of the 100-acre site to a private developer. Since public funds were involved, the city and the state were required by law to have a copy.

Southfield officials repeatedly denied they’d ever seen the report. The state Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy denied it, too.

But I found it. All 1,011 pages of it. Its contents are shocking. According to the report, there were four mammoth piles at the site in 2021 covering 30 acres and standing 50 feet tall.

These mountains were photographed and dozens of boring samples were taken. The results? All four were super-contaminated, containing PCBs, arsenic, lead, selenium, chromium, barium, and polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons at levels that in some cases exceeded human safety thresholds by 500%.

These toxins can enter the body, causing cellular mutations, brain disorders, cancer, and death.

As a condition of the Northland sale, the developer was supposed to dispose of the Franken-soil at a specialized landfill. Instead, Detroit’s inspector general alleges some of it got dumped in the city’s neighborhoods.

Where did the rest of the dirt go? Most of it still sits in Southfield, except when the winds pick up and it blows all over the children playing outside at the neighboring daycare centers.

In fact, the developer is currently excavating one pile where a soccer dome is slated to be built. Instead of taking it to a landfill, crews are dumping that pile on top of two other contaminated piles just a few hundred yards away.

Despite our warnings, no government agency is doing a thing about it. They’ve all been contacted—a veritable alphabet soup of bureaucracy: CDC, EPA, EGLE, MDOT, and the Michigan AG.

The scope of this thing is massive. The price of the cleanup could reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Not to mention the inevitable class-action lawsuits.

And it’s all Siver’s fault.

A decade ago, he gave the okay for area contractors to bring the shitty soil from their road, sewer, and utility projects to the site. The shit belonged in a landfill, but Siver and his dimwits figured they’d use it to fill the miles of tunnels underneath the old mall and then stick condominiums on top.

The condos are half-built, the city is out tens of millions of dollars, and the weasel of Southfield is trapped in his own hole.