City focus now on cleanup

With a bitter four-year court battle resolved, Mapleton and the Ensign-Bickford company are redirecting all their energies to the cleanup efforts around the contaminated site that was once home to the company's explosives plant.

The two sides agreed last week to drop the lawsuits each held against the other. The court battle began in 1994 when the city filed suit in 4th District Court against Ensign-Bickford, alleging the company had contaminated the city's water wells. The two sides settled the case in 1997.

However, in 2003, Mapleton filed a $100 million lawsuit against the company, accusing it of failing to clean up contaminated water sites as it had agreed to do in 1997.

Ensign-Bickford denied the city's claim, accused Mapleton of violating the settlement agreement and countersued for $1 million in legal fees.

In the meantime, the company closed the plant in February, saying it wanted to focus on other ventures.

In the agreement reached last week, however, each side agreed to dismiss the lawsuit without prejudice, meaning the same suits cannot be brought back in the future.

Each side also agreed to cover its own attorney fees.

"It's dead, finished, zero, kaput," said Ensign-Bickford spokesman Mike Long.

Now, both parties are returning the focus to the ongoing soil and water cleanup efforts at the site, located at the mouth of Spanish Fork Canyon.

Although the site is just inside Spanish Fork's boundaries, Mapleton accused the plant owners of spilling contaminated water into an aquifer that runs north for about three miles underneath Mapleton.

"Ongoing litigation is distracting from both a staffing standpoint and a dollar standpoint," Long said. "There's only so many hours in the day and so many dollars in the pot, so not having to deal with litigation means we can devote all our resources to the ongoing remediation process."

Doug Thayer, Mapleton's attorney, said the two sides had been working to reach a settlement since the lawsuits were initially filed in 2003, but efforts escalated in recent months, when officials from both sides began meeting in person.

Attorneys for both sides said they were not closely involved in the final talks and were asked to draw up the settlement agreement based on what the officials discussed in their private meetings.

"It's what the city agreed to, and it's what the city wanted," Thayer said.

In a previous settlement with the state, Ensign-Bickford agreed to pay $9.375 million to purchase and maintain three water pumps to clean contaminated aquifer water and an additional $2.58 million for a state trust fund maintained by the Department of Environmental Quality.