The sally port project for the Perry Police Department recently hit a snag due to an environmental issue.

City Administrator Sven Peterson says they expected to run into potential environmental roadblocks with the project, but the nature of the problem took them by surprise. “Being an old gas station site, we thought there could be some contamination from gasoline. Actually that was not the case. This is historical coal tar contamination from a site maybe a block away. When they were doing the excavation for the footings of that project, they hit an old abandoned tile line that had collected some of this coal tar from an old MidAmerican project. And so that kind of filled in a hole that they had dug with some of that coal tar residue. They’ll be remediating that and hopefully getting back on this week with construction.”

For their part, MidAmerican Energy has accepted responsibility and will be helping to clean up the contamination. As a bit of good news, the structure for the sally port has been delivered, so Peterson expects the project to leap forward very soon. He estimates the project to be completed sometime around November.