The members of Citizens for Environmental Justice have gathered in a cramped East Side kitchen to talk about the end. The mood is sepulchral, like someone has died — someone other than the two neighbors who were lost to rare forms of brain tumors in the last few years.

Since 2000, this group has fought the Board of County Commissioners over plans to build the new Youth Intervention Center — a courthouse and jail — at East 93rd and Quincy. Neighbors of the site know from experience how dangerous that piece of land is. But the commissioners haven't listened.

The residents wonder, how long will it be before juvenile detainees start getting sick?

"It's going to look like ADHD, at first," says Vera Brewer, lifelong resident of Fairfax. "But it's not ADHD. It's something else."

When Brewer's son was just a few months old, doctors discovered high levels of lead in his system. It caused a form of brain damage, and he suffers from learning disabilities to this day. "I was so careful, I knew it wasn't paint. In our area, we have a lot of children like that."

And it's not only children who have suffered. Brewer's mother died of a rare form of bladder cancer. Then there are the spontaneous abortions; miscarriages are occurring at greater and greater frequency among the population around East 93rd, says Brewer. She participated in a study in the '90's to determine the cause of the deaths. "Too many babies was dying, and they needed to know why." But Brewer has never seen the results of the study, and recent attempts to locate documents were not successful.

The residents think something is in the water. They believe the water is poisoned by the chemicals that remain in the ground under the property at 93rd and Quincy, deposited by industry in decades past. Brewer doesn't drink it anymore.

"Somebody needs to go to jail," says Linda Thompson. This meeting is in her kitchen, and Thompson sits in a wheelchair, leaning forward over her feet. Her eyes narrow. She's angry about the latest letter from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency — the letter that promises to protect the Cuyahoga County commissioners from civil liability for their decision to build the new juvenile intervention center on that land.

"We're supposed to sit by and take this?" she asks.

No One Listened - The Citizens for Environmental Justice tried to warn us. (L-R: Luther Smith, Linda Thompson, Vera Brewer)

Thompson is a leader in the Fairfax community. Today, she's fighting mad about this letter, this "Covenant Not to Sue," which finally allows construction on the $120 million juvenile jail and courthouse to begin. The letter signifies that Thompson has finally lost, after six years of protests and legal battles. Construction will commence. And soon, troubled youth from across the county — some from her own neighborhood — will serve time near a deposit of toxic chemicals.

Above Thompson hangs a poster. It's a message for the group-home residents she looks after, but it also provides inspiration to this justice brigade: Always hold firmly to the thought that each one of us can do something to bring some portion of misery to an end.

Today that affirmation mocks them.

The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (OEPA) does not deny that the groundwater below Fairfax is contaminated. But an environmental report ordered by county officials claimed that everyone in the neighborhood received the same city water as the rest of Cleveland. So a little lead and arsenic in the water below them is a negligible risk.

And it's cleaner than it was, at least. Since 2000, county commissioners have spent more than $10 million cleaning the property, hiring contractors to haul away rubble and contaminated soil. It certainly looks clean — except for that patch of land at the corner of 93rd and Quincy.

Due to a spill of PCBs (polychlorinated biphenals, organic byproducts of industrial waste that may cause cancer and liver damage) at the site when it was still a brewery, the county can never build on that northwest corner. It's too toxic, and the Board of Commissioners won't spend the extra money to clean it up. They have a zoning variance that allows them to build around it.

As the backhoes and bulldozers rumble in the distance, this patch of land — roughly 50 feet by 80 feet — remains untouched.

County administrator Lee Trotter says there is no cause for alarm. "The PCBs are 30 or 40 feet below the surface," says Trotter. "The chemicals are locked in shale, so they won't go anywhere."

But the members of Citizens for Environmental Justice don't trust Trotter. It's hard for them to trust anything about this deal when it looks so political.

They haven't forgotten that this started when Mike White was still mayor. They haven't forgotten that Sam Miller's company pocketed more than $2 million. And they haven't forgotten about Ralph Tyler Jr., whose company won the bid to design the new juvenile center. Ralph Tyler Cos. won a lot of bids back then, and some suggest this had more to do with Tyler's relationship with Nate Gray, another friend of our former mayor's, than anything else.

SAM MILLER

SOMETIME BEFORE 1993, a thief broke into the old Schmidt & Sons brewery looking for scrap metal. The median household income for a Fairfax resident is $6,112, so the metal fixtures in a long-abandoned factory could look very tempting to someone in need of quick cash. But whoever took apart the electrical transformers, located in the basement of the building closest to 93rd, probably didn't know that this would cause a leak of PCBs. The mess wasn't discovered until the property was evaluated in September 1993. And by then, the chemicals had pooled and mixed with water, contaminating the ground below.

At the time, the vacant brewery was owned by the estate of Ernest Stern. After a sample of the stagnant water around the transformers turned up PCBs, the Stern estate hired a demolition crew to tear down the buildings. The rubble lay there for years.

In February 1997, the Cleveland Fire Department ordered the Sterns to remove the hazardous waste. In April, the sewer department issued violations after PCBs were discharged when a rainstorm flooded a sewer system holding tank.

Later that year, then-Mayor Mike White referred to the property as "the worst environmental hazard in the city." Further testing on the site revealed drums of oil buried in the ground and high concentrations of a chemical called Aroclor 1260, a substance known to cause miscarriages and brain damage in children.

In '98, the federal EPA ordered the Stern estate to clean up the property. The Sterns paid $2 million to excavate the ground around the PCB spill and to remove asbestos. Then another study, conducted at the request of the estate, suggested that the remaining contaminates trapped in the soil at the northwest corner would not migrate off the property. In August, the EPA agreed, and City Council's Planning Committee granted a zoning variance for that patch of land.

But by 1999, the Sterns were hundreds of thousands of dollars behind in taxes owed to the county. After spending $2 million cleaning it up, the Sterns didn't fight when the parcels that made up the site slipped into forfeiture. "We were just glad to be rid of the property," says Richard Stern, executor of Ernest Stern's estate, when reached at his Pittsburgh office. "We inherited a problem that cost my family a lot of money."

In July 1999, the land was sold at public auction to Sunrise Land Company for $383,571. Sunrise Land Company is a subsidiary of Forest City.

THAT SAME YEAR, the NAACP helped form a committee to find an appropriate location for a new Youth Intervention Center. The county hired a real estate company to generate a list of potential sites, and according to committee member Sara Harper, a retired Ohio Court of Appeals judge, 93rd and Quincy was not on it.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, Mayor White proposed building on the same land he had deemed the most toxic property in the city just two years earlier. Harper was stunned.

"Why would you purchase land that was contaminated?" she recalls wondering. "We looked at sites that would have been much better."

RALPH TYLER

White turned down proposals that suggested other sites for the facility — and most City Council members were not keen on hosting the new juvie jail in their wards anyway. Only Pat Britt, whose ward contained the Forest City-owned property, welcomed it. Britt was well respected in the county's Democratic hierarchy. On the fast track to mayor, some said.

On February 29, 2000, County Commissioners Jimmy Dimora, Timothy McCormack and Jane Campbell approved the purchase, ultimately agreeing to spend $2.75 million for the property and several smaller parcels also owned by Forest City (one of which was not actually purchased by Forest City until the next day). The purchase price was contingent on an appraisal that assumed the toxic chemical spill had been properly cleaned up. An independent study conducted for Forest City in 1999 had revealed the existence of PCBs in the soil, but the appraisal company was not furnished with a copy of that report.

Dimora, the only current commissioner who had a say in the deal to move juvenile court to toxic land on the East Side, declined to comment for this story.

The sale became official in August 2000. Forest City netted a more than 600-percent return on an investment in contaminated property in just over a year.

In hindsight, the purchase of the land seems almost prophetic.

Then again, Sam Miller had Mike White's ear. Miller, the aged co-chairman of the board at Forest City, was known to keep in close contact with White.

Free Times inquired about this relationship last week. When reached by phone, Miller said, "I'm not giving any interviews, period. I just got out of a sick bed." When asked specifically whether he used his influence to steer the juvenile center project, Miller said, "I have no comment."

Robert Monchein, the Forest City executive who spearheaded the acquisition, draws a blank. "I'd be hard pressed to remember any specific land deal," he says. He asked that Free Times submit questions in writing, and a list was sent on September 28. At press time five days later, he had not responded.

A review of property assessments conducted at the request of the Board of County Commissioners reveals the extent of the environmental damage that still existed when the land was purchased from Forest City. Soil samples showed high concentrations of chemicals that could harm workers hired to clean up the site, including benzene, toluene, lead and thallium. Nickel and arsenic were discovered in groundwater samples.

Independence Excavating was hired by the Board of County Commissioners to haul away the bad soil. To date, the county has spent over $10 million remediating the property, including $3 million in state money and more than $350,000 from the federal government.

Mike White

Six architectural firms were invited to submit designs for the Youth Intervention Center. Three months later, Ralph Tyler Cos. was selected by the commissioners.

Ralph Tyler Cos. was later named in a subpoena related to the investigation of Nate Gray's relationship with East Cleveland officials. Prosecutors accused Ralph Tyler Cos. of funneling $10,000 a month to Gray to bribe public officials for contracts. A lawyer for Ralph Tyler Cos. has denied these allegations and Ralph Tyler Jr. has never been charged. He did not respond to repeated requests for an interview for this article.

Records for Independence Excavating were also subpoenaed in the Nate Gray investigation.

"There's only so few jobs in Cleveland and only so many contractors," explains Robert DiGeronimo, co-owner of Independence Excavating. "It's a matter of coincidence more than anything. I've never met Nate Gray. He had no relation with us to this job, at all." The owners of Independence Excavating have not been charged with any wrongdoing.

In 2005, Plain Dealer reporter Mike Tobin received details of an FBI investigation into Nate Gray's dirty deals. The leaked documents included an interview between an FBI agent and Ricardo Teamor, who was running a front company in a scheme to finagle minority contracts for contractors. Teamor described routine business dinners held by White, Gray and Miller inside the Ritz Carlton. According to Teamor, Gray believed that Miller controlled White and told him what to do. And Teamor said Gray told him that Independence Excavating did work on White's Newcomerstown alpaca farm in exchange for city projects.

Last year Gray was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison for his role in bribing East Cleveland Mayor Emmanuel Onunwor and other public officials. But a federal investigation continues. A U.S. Attorney's Office spokesman will neither confirm nor deny the investigation includes the juvenile court deal.

A report that may shed light on these county contracts is being kept secret at City Hall.

Before she left office, Mayor Jane Campbell appointed a special investigator to look into local contractors that may be operating as front companies to win public contracts. The report was completed earlier this year by attorney Craig Owen White, but Mayor Frank Jackson will not release it. His law director says the report — funded by taxpayers — is not public record.

In 2004, the OEPA held a public meeting about the 93rd and Quincy site at the offices of Fairfax Renaissance Development Corporation (FRDC), a nonprofit land bank located a half-mile west on Quincy. No one attended, according to an internal OEPA e-mail obtained by Free Times. Presenters watched "a lively Power Point presentation on the Lakeview Bluff's Vineyard while we waited for folks to show up," the e-mail states.

Area activist Linda Thompson says neither she nor anyone else in Citizens for Environmental Justice was notified of the meeting. Neither was John Boyd, an elected representative for Fairfax Precinct G. Thompson believes the FRDC kept the meeting secret so that officials from the OEPA would believe residents were not concerned about the property.

NOT YET CLEAN - As work continues, water pools above the PCBs that remain hidden underground.

According to its Web site, "FRDC assisted with the successful transfer of ownership of this site from the Ernest Stern estate Å  to locally based Forest City Enterprises Inc."

But FRDC executive director Vickie Eaton-Johnson, who got the job after leaving White's administration, apparently doesn't want to talk about the deal anymore. Calls and e-mails to her were not returned, and when a reporter arrived in the FRDC and asked to speak with Eaton-Johnson, he was asked to leave.

Thompson also wonders where Councilwoman Pat Britt has been through all of this. Britt does not speak to the local activists anymore, and did not respond to Free Times' calls.

"Pat Britt sold us out," Thompson says, adding that she believes the Ward 6 councilwoman is more interested in currying favor with Democratic leaders than she is in investigating the condition of the property at 93rd and Quincy.

"The land is contaminated. And then you have 42 trains running on the tracks behind the property every single day. Even the conductors don't know what they're carrying."

A study conducted by the project manager hired by the juvenile court judges reveals that trains hauling dangerous chemicals are routed through the property on their way to disposal sites. The study called for an evacuation plan in the event a derailment involving a toxic spill while youths are detained there. It is unclear whether an evacuation plan currently exists.

"It shows a pattern of behavior," says Sara Harper, the former judge who joined the group of activists after Thompson called into her NAACP-sponsored radio show. Harper pulls a letter from her files and places it on Thompson's kitchen table. Everyone groans loudly. They've seen it before.

The letter comes from U.S. Sen. Mike DeWine's office. In response to Harper's request for DeWine to investigate the property, it states, "According to the USEPA, the site has been remediated to the fullest extent as determined by the extensive testing that has been done on the site."

The letter is dated April 7, 2000 — before Cuyahoga County spent more than $10 million removing contaminated soil from the property.

They tried for six years to warn officials. And now it's too late.

jrenner@freetimes.com