Kansas Cleanup Sites Get Rechecked Every Five Years. The Only Public Input Channel Is an Interview Almost Nobody Asks For.
← Back to Blog Environmental

Kansas Cleanup Sites Get Rechecked Every Five Years. The Only Public Input Channel Is an Interview Almost Nobody Asks For.

A five-year review rechecks whether a finished Kansas cleanup still works. There is no comment period. The one documented input channel is an interview.

by iSi Environmental

EPA’s Fourth Five-Year Review for the Coleman operable unit of the 29th and Mead site in Wichita states why it skipped the public: “Interviews were not conducted with the general public for this FYR since the EPA had not received any complaints or concerns from the public or businesses adjacent to the Site.” KDHE’s first five-year review for the North Industrial Corridor, the larger Kansas-led site that surrounds it, records that the legal notice “was not published.” Two agencies, two reviews, the same ground in north Wichita, and the same outcome for anyone who lives or operates on it.

That is the practical shape of a five-year review at a contaminated site in Kansas. It is the recurring recheck a lead agency runs on a cleanup that is finished and operating, and it is the only regular public statement about whether the remedy next door is still doing its job. It carries no comment period. The one documented way a property owner gets into the record is to ask to be interviewed, in writing, before the review closes.

The numbers at the largest Kansas example are moving the right way

Start with the trend, because it runs against the way this subject usually gets written. At the North Industrial Corridor in Wichita, PCE and TCE in groundwater have fallen from greater than 1,000 µg/L to less than 100 µg/L, driven by source control and natural attenuation (City of Wichita). In 2022 the City reported just under 155 million gallons of groundwater extracted for treatment, with four additional wells turned on that January.

The site is large. The City puts it at 4,011 acres, roughly four miles long by a mile and a half wide. KDHE and EPA both describe it as extending over 4,000 acres (KDHE; EPA Fourth Five-Year Review). KDHE describes the footprint as mixed industrial, commercial, residential, recreational, and agricultural property, which is the detail most people miss about a site they picture as an industrial district.

Improvement and unresolved exposure are both true here. As of 2022 the City reported roughly 139 acres of the shallow aquifer and roughly 695 acres of the deep aquifer still above drinking water standards. Vapor intrusion was assessed as its own pathway rather than assumed away, with KDHE approving the vapor intrusion reports in August 2012 and June 2014 (KDHE). A pathway that gets its own documented evaluation is the system working.

Two agencies share the same ground and the same load-bearing control

Five of the six operable units of the former 29th and Mead Superfund site are managed by KDHE and the City of Wichita. OU2, the Coleman operable unit, is 1,440 acres, sits inside the North Industrial Corridor footprint, and remains EPA-lead (EPA Fourth Five-Year Review).

The two are linked rather than opposed. EPA’s Fourth Five-Year Review states that “No groundwater or soil institutional control (IC) is required by the 1992 ROD for OU2,” and that the protection instead comes from City of Wichita Municipal Code Title 7, Chapter 7.30, Section 7.30.105, which prohibits new water wells in contaminated areas. That is the same ordinance carrying the site-wide control across the North Industrial Corridor. The report also delegates the unit’s final controls back to the state document: “Institutional controls associated with the final groundwater remedy will be covered by the NIC Corrective Action Decision document.”

So the load-bearing protection across thousands of acres in Wichita is a municipal ordinance rather than a recorded deed restriction. A city council can amend an ordinance without an environmental proceeding. That is a different risk profile than an instrument recorded against a parcel, and it is worth knowing which one stands between a property and a drilled well.

What is a five-year review of a contaminated site?

A five-year review is a recurring re-evaluation of a completed cleanup, required where contamination remains on site. 40 CFR 300.430(f)(4)(ii) requires the lead agency to “review such action no less than every five years after the initiation of the selected remedial action.” It evaluates whether the remedy still protects health and the environment. It is not a new cleanup decision.

The statutory root is CERCLA §121(c), codified at 42 U.S.C. §9621(c), which directs that where a remedial action leaves hazardous substances at a site, the remedy is reviewed “no less often than each five years after the initiation of such remedial action to assure that human health and the environment are being protected” (EPA). The National Contingency Plan carries the same duty in regulation.

Read the distinction carefully, because it drives everything else. The question a review answers is whether the remedy is still working, not whether the site is clean. Those are different questions with different evidence behind them.

What triggers a five-year review, and does every cleaned-up site get one?

No. The trigger is contamination left in place. 40 CFR 300.430(f)(4)(ii) applies only where hazardous substances remain “above levels that allow for unlimited use and unrestricted exposure.” A site cleaned to unrestricted-use standards gets no recurring review, which is why the absence of a five-year review is not by itself good news or bad news.

EPA frames the obligation as arising from CERCLA “or program policy,” and notes that reviews “can be performed by EPA or the lead agency for a site,” with EPA keeping responsibility for the protectiveness determination at Superfund sites (EPA). The trigger follows the contamination, not the program the site happens to sit in.

For a buyer, the useful reading is that a site with no five-year review either finished clean or never had a remedy that left anything behind. Establish which one before treating silence as a clearance.

Does KDHE have a five-year review policy for Kansas sites?

No. The KDHE Bureau of Environmental Remediation policy index runs BER-RS-001 through BER-RS-058 and contains no five-year review policy, verified by direct reading of the BER Policies index on August 26, 2026. On State Cooperative Program sites the obligation flows from the site’s own decision document and the NCP standard it adopts, not from Kansas statute or regulation.

The nearest relatives in the series govern adjacent work: BER-RS-036 covers scope of work for site monitoring, BER-RS-024 covers site closure in the State Cooperative Program, and BER-RS-009 covers decision document development. None of them establishes a review interval.

This matters when someone tells you what Kansas “requires” on a state-lead site. The requirement lives in the site file. At the North Industrial Corridor that is the Final Corrective Action Decision for Interim Groundwater Remediation, approved in March 2012 (KDHE). Pull the decision document, not the news release.

Can the public comment on a Kansas five-year review?

No comment period exists. Unlike a KDHE Agency Decision Statement or Corrective Action Decision, a five-year review is a technical re-evaluation with no statutory comment right, no hearing right and no appeal. The one documented channel is the review’s interview process, which the lead agency conducts at its discretion.

The contrast is the story. KDHE attaches a 15-day comment period to a draft Agency Decision Statement, and that window is a real procedural right with a written agency response behind it. A five-year review has no equivalent. It is an agency self-evaluation of its own remedy, and the public record it produces is a report rather than a docket.

Which puts the whole weight on the interview. Both reviews covering the Wichita ground went forward without public interviews, one because no complaints had come in and one because the legal notice was not published. A discretionary channel closes itself when nobody uses it. If you own or operate on a site with a review underway, send a written request to the project manager asking to be interviewed, and send it before the review closes rather than after the report posts.

What does a “protectiveness determination” actually mean?

It is a formal category, and the wording matters more than the summary. EPA’s Fourth Five-Year Review for the Coleman OU concluded “Short-term Protective,” not “Protective,” stating the remedy “is protective of human health and the environment in the short term” while “long-term protectiveness will be completed through the establishment of an Institutional Control for contaminated soil.”

Sit with what that means. The determination is conditional on a control that the same report says does not exist yet. A property owner who reads only the headline sentence walks away thinking the file is closed.

The categories are the fastest quality check available on any review. Find the determination, read the exact category, then find the condition attached to it.

What is the difference between “protective,” “short-term protective” and “protectiveness deferred”?

They describe different confidence levels. “Protectiveness Deferred” means no determination could be made: the 2015 Third Five-Year Review for the Coleman OU stated protectiveness “cannot be determined at this time until further information is obtained.” “Short-term protective” means the remedy works now but long-term protection depends on unfinished conditions. Only “protective” is unconditional.

Both of the conditional categories appear in the record for the same operable unit five years apart, which is a useful thing to know before assuming a category is a formality. EPA’s chronology for the unit gives a first review in September 2005, a second in September 2010, and a third in September 2015, with the fourth covering the review period of September 22, 2015 through August 28, 2020 (EPA Fourth Five-Year Review).

Track the category across reviews rather than reading one in isolation. A movement from deferred to short-term protective tells you something. A single snapshot does not.

Who is responsible for a five-year review at a Kansas State Cooperative Program site?

KDHE. The State Cooperative Program was established in 1991 “to address complex, higher priority contaminated sites that are not in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund Program,” and KDHE provides the technical oversight (KDHE). Where an EPA-lead operable unit sits inside the same geography, EPA reviews that unit separately and retains its own protectiveness determination.

Wichita is the working illustration of that split. One geography, one shared municipal ordinance, and two lead agencies producing separate reviews on separate schedules for parcels that a resident would describe as the same neighborhood.

Confirm the lead agency before you go looking for documents. Searching EPA’s system for a KDHE-lead site returns nothing, and the reverse is equally unhelpful.

How do I find out if my property is inside a contaminated site boundary in Kansas?

Check KDHE’s Identified Sites List and the Kansas Environmental Interest Finder against the parcel, then search the county register of deeds for a recorded Environmental Use Control. The two answer different questions. Note that the Identified Sites List expressly excludes underground and above-ground storage tank sites, so a petroleum release will not appear.

That exclusion is KDHE’s own language, and it is the reason the list cannot stand as diligence on its own. KDHE describes it as a tool that aids due diligence. A gasoline release on the adjoining parcel can be entirely absent from it.

The deed record is the half that binds. The Identified Sites List tells you a site exists nearby. Only the recorded instrument tells you whether something attaches to the parcel you are buying, and only one of those two facts survives a closing.

What is an Environmental Use Control and does it bind me if I buy the property?

Yes. Under K.S.A. 65-1,222(b) an environmental use control “runs with the property and is binding on the owner and subsequent owners, lessees and other users of the land.” It is recorded with the county register of deeds. Typical restrictions bar well drilling, soil-cap disturbance, or residential use, and they reach a buyer who never negotiated them.

The statute also frames why the control exists: it is issued “as requested by the property owner at the time of issuance” to ensure future protection “when environmental contamination which exceeds department standards for unrestricted use remains on the property.” Other common terms require notification during utility excavation and prohibit disturbing an engineered cap.

Oversight sits with KDHE’s Long-Term Stewardship and Brownfields Unit, which provides oversight of the Environmental Use Control program and also reviews and processes Certificate of Liability Release applications. One governance note worth carrying: the only EUC-specific policy in the BER series, BER-RS-051, “Guidelines for Category 1 Properties in the Environmental Use Control Program,” is listed as Rescinded on the BER Policies index. The reason for the rescission is not stated in the published record, so read it as a fact about the policy set rather than as a verdict on the program.

What happens if a five-year review finds a problem?

The review issues a formal Issue with a Recommendation, a named responsible party, an oversight party and a milestone date. EPA’s Fourth Five-Year Review for the Coleman OU recorded “There are no soil restrictions for OU2” and recommended establishing a control restricting residential land use, with a milestone date of 3/31/2021. Findings generate obligations for the responsible party, not for neighbors.

The Issues and Recommendations table is the single most useful page in any five-year review and the one most often skipped. Open items with a past-due milestone date are the fastest read on whether a site is being actively managed.

At the North Industrial Corridor the responsible-party picture is mixed. EPA’s Fourth Five-Year Review records that “Three of the RPs have source areas that are still being investigated and the remedy has not begun. Eleven of the RPs have remedies that are currently being implemented, and eight RPs have remedies that have met their Remedial Action Objectives.” A single site boundary can hold parcels at three different stages of cleanup at the same time.

How reliable is the five-year review as a warning system?

Less than it appears. EPA’s own Inspector General concluded in March 2025 that “this review frequency may not accurately reflect site conditions” and that “violations of the institutional controls may also continue in the interim.” At one site, trespassing and camping in violation of restrictive covenants had continued “since at least March 2007.”

The documentation behind the reviews is thinner than most people assume. Report 25-E-0020, dated March 19, 2025, found that of 70 sites reviewed, 15 of the 29 with implemented institutional controls had no institutional control data in EPA’s tracking module, covering about $483 million in IIJA funds. For sites with planned controls the figure was 41 of 52, or 79 percent, covering about $956 million. Staff in four of ten regions said they do not update the module for any site milestone at all.

The five-year review is also carrying more weight than it was built for. In the three regions that do maintain the data, OIG found staff “reported entering the data during each five-year review,” and that without a manual review of individual site documents “there is no way to determine whether documents are missing.” EPA agreed with four of five recommendations and disagreed with the fifth, which asked the agency to make its system capable of tracking planned institutional controls. That recommendation remains formally unresolved, with EPA’s stated position that “public awareness and oversight of ICs does not depend on internal information included in SEMS.”

No comparable audit exists at the Kansas level. Nothing published by KDHE or Kansas Legislative Post Audit addresses five-year review timeliness or institutional control enforcement, so treat the federal finding as a federal finding rather than as a description of Kansas practice.

My site’s review is late. Does that mean something is wrong?

Not necessarily, and a late review is not itself evidence of a problem with the remedy. Reviews slip for scheduling and resourcing reasons that the public record usually does not explain. Read the last completed review’s protectiveness category and its open recommendations rather than inferring anything from the gap between reviews.

The last completed report is the better document anyway. It states the determination, the condition attached to it, and every open recommendation with its milestone date. A gap in the calendar tells you nothing that page does not tell you better.

If the delay concerns you, use it. A review in progress is the window where an interview request has somewhere to land.

What a property owner should actually do

There is no compliance obligation on a neighboring owner and no penalty attached to a five-year review. It imposes no duty on you, so there is no fine, no citation, and nothing that runs against your property because of it. The financial exposure on this topic sits in a different instrument entirely, the recorded Environmental Use Control that binds whoever owns the land next.

Seven steps, in order:

  1. Locate the site and confirm the lead agency. State Cooperative Program sites are KDHE-lead and NPL sites are EPA-lead, and a single geography can hold both.
  2. Pull the governing decision document rather than the news release. On a State Cooperative site, that document is what establishes the review obligation.
  3. Read the most recent five-year review for its protectiveness statement and its exact category.
  4. Check the Issues and Recommendations table for open items with a past-due milestone date.
  5. Search the county register of deeds for a recorded Environmental Use Control on the specific parcel. Site-wide controls and parcel-specific controls are different instruments with different reach.
  6. If a control exists, identify who enforces it. In Kansas that is KDHE’s Long-Term Stewardship and Brownfields Unit.
  7. Ask to be interviewed. On a five-year review this is the only documented input channel, it is discretionary, and it is the step to take before the review closes.

On cleanup numbers, Kansas standards come from the Risk-based Standards for Kansas (RSK) Manual, 6th version, which describes the process for setting chemical-specific and site-specific cleanup goals for soil, groundwater, and indoor air. For a contaminant with a federal primary MCL, the Tier 2 groundwater cleanup concentration equals the MCL for both residential and non-residential land use. That is the yardstick a consultant is applying when they tell you a residual concentration is acceptable.

How the neighboring states handle the same phase

Missouri handles the same phase through long-term stewardship. The state’s Brownfields and Voluntary Cleanup Program provides that where residual contamination is safely left on a property after a certificate of completion is issued, “an environmental covenant is placed in the property chain-of-title and the site enters long-term stewardship,” which the program defines to include “inspection, maintenance, information management and distribution and public awareness” (Missouri DNR). The instrument differs from a Kansas EUC in name, but the shape is the same: a recorded restriction plus an ongoing maintenance obligation that outlives the cleanup itself.

Nebraska’s Voluntary Cleanup Program was established in 1995 by the Remedial Action Plan Monitoring Act and concludes with a No Further Action letter (Nebraska DEE). Oklahoma’s post-remedy review mechanics are left out of this post because we did not verify them against a primary source, and an unverified comparison is worse than no comparison.

Where this leaves you

The instrument that governs a Kansas site after the remedy is built is the site’s own decision document, and the recurring public output is a report with no comment period attached. Contamination at the largest example in the state is measurably down, which is real. The same file also shows 695 acres of deep aquifer above drinking water standards, a protectiveness determination conditioned on a control that had not been established, and a load-bearing restriction that lives in a city ordinance. Both halves belong in the same sentence.

Getting into that record takes a written interview request sent while a review is open. Understanding what the record already says about a specific parcel takes a file review, and that is the same work that supports a defensible transaction position.

iSi Environmental runs Phase I Environmental Site Assessments to the ASTM E1527-21 standard, including the agency file review that shows whether a parcel sits inside a site boundary, whether a recorded use control attaches to it, and what the last protectiveness determination said. If you own, operate, or are buying near a Kansas remediation site, start there. Talk to our team →

We Plug In. You Level Up.

Sources

Tags: