Cleaning up your property or site
A cleanup site is defined by the extent of the hazardous substance release. In other words, the site is where the contamination is, regardless of property bounadries. A site may include multiple property parcels. You may choose to clean up just your property (property cleanup) or the entire site (site cleanup). There is specific guidance for property cleanups.
Documenting the cleanup
Our assistance is based on information you provide. Your reports should be complete and accurate. Include relevant background information and a general summary of the site.
If applicable, include:
For a quicker review and opinion of remedial investigation reports, please use our remedial investigation report template.
Professional certification
Documents containing geologic, hydrogeologic, or engineering work must be stamped by an appropriately licensed professional. For guidance on what work requires a license, refer to:
Submitting electronic data
You must upload your cleanup site sampling data to our Environmental Information Management (EIM) system. Upload data and send us the accompanying reports as soon as possible after collection. Review cleanup site data submittal requirements.
Requesting opinions
We review opinion requests in the order we receive the completed requests. To enter the queue, a complete request for opinion must consist of:
Types of opinions we issue
We issue four types of opinions for cleanup projects:
- Further Action opinions when further action is necessary, or if a proposed cleanup will not likely meet cleanup requirements
- Further Action Likely opinions when further cleanup will likely be necessary or if proposed actions are not likely to meet cleanup requirements
- No Further Action Likely opinions when your proposed cleanup will likely meet cleanup requirements
- No Further Action opinions when your cleanup meets all requirements
Opinions are void if any of the information you provide to us is materially false or misleading. We can rescind a No Further Action determination if new information shows that site contamination conditions are inaccurately or inadequately represented.
Using opinions to inform future work
Opinions provide our current understanding of the status of your cleanup. You can use our opinions to help define the scope of additional investigation and cleanup needed to meet Washington’s cleanup law and regulations.
How the VCP charges you
Ecology bills you for the time we work on your cleanup project. Examples of billable activities include communications with your designated customer team, document review, and preparing opinions.
We mail an invoice to your billing contact for each month your project incurs charges.
Full payment is due within 30 days of the invoice date. If we do not receive payment within 30 days, we will notify you and withhold issuing opinions for your project. We stop all work on projects with payments outstanding over 60 days. If you do not pay an invoice within 90 days we may send the outstanding bill to collections.
Customer team
As part of your application to join the VCP, we ask you to designate a customer team with a project manager as our primary point of contact.
Your customer team could be only you or it might include environmental consultants, attorneys, property owners and managers, and billing specialists. You decide who you want us to work with.
Changing your customer team
You can change members of your customer team at any time. If you need to do this, send us a completed change of contact form.
Customer changes
If the customer listed on your VCP agreement changes, the new customer will need to sign a new agreement. The assigned cleanup project manager would likely remain the same.
Expectations