You may have received a letter from the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (IEPA) or from A3 Environmental Consultants saying “NFR Not Recorded”. It means you never recorded the “No Further Remediation” (NFR) letter for a leaking underground storage tank that was on your property in the past.
Most people’s reaction is shock mixed with a little bit of fear. You’re thinking, “Didn’t we take care of that years ago?”
You did, but not completely. Over the last year the IEPA has ratcheted up the enforcement on these matters over. They sent out 2500 letters with more punitive measures to come.
Finding Your Leaking Underground Storage Tank in the IEPA Database.
Illinois Environmental Protection Agency Online Database
Click through the link above. It will open in another browser window. You will find several ways to filter for your property. The easiest way is to put in the LPC Number or the IEMA Number. If A3 Environmental Consultants sent you a letter about this, both numbers will be on the letter you received.
The second easiest way to find your property is to start with the county, zip code and city and then scroll through the sites until you find yours.
IEPA LUST Database
How To Read Your LUST Database Record
You will notice the IEMA Number is clickable and will open your database record. In the example below you can see a NFR Date and right below it a NFR Recorded Date. Yours is empty right?
45 Days To Record Your No Further Remediation Letter
You have 45 days to record your NFR with your County Recorder of Deeds. This person is the elected official in your county tasked with the responsibility of maintaining property records of all kinds. When you go to sell your property, the title company and other interested parties will request these public records from the recorder and make sure everything is in order before purchasing your property.
NFR Not Recorded, Now What?
If the NFR is not recorded, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency will start sending letters and may ultimately void your “No Further Remediation” letter. What does this mean?
Environmental Remediation Do-Over
You may be forced to redo all the work it took to get the NFR in the first place. This can often mean over $100,000 of environmental consultants, drillers, laboratory work and year(s) of back-and-forth with the IEPA.
Worse still, the environmental regulations keep getting more stringent. If your NFR is voided, you may find yourself having to clean your property to 2022 standards. For all sorts of reasons, you’ll probably be happier and wealthier if you stick with the standards of 10, 20 or 30 years ago.
Can’t Sell Your Property
Your property is considered environmentally impacted if your NFR is voided, even if it was cleaned to standards of the time. When you go to sell the property, all these records will show up during the due diligence period. The commercial real estate buyer will likely perform Phase I Environmental Site Assessment, usually at the financial institution’s request. A voided NFR may stop the sale until it can be sorted out. Often, it kills a sale completely, generally because of the amount of time it takes.
Can’t Refinance Your Property
Even if you don’t plan to sell your property any time soon, you may want or even need to refinance it from time to time. A voided NFR letter will stop your refinance when the bank runs an environmental record search. Often refinances of commercial property are done under difficult circumstances. There may be a bill that can’t get paid without extra money. You may need to refinance quickly to buy another property or invest in another opportunity. The taxman, collections department or ex-spouse could be knocking at the door and need to get paid quickly. A voided NFR could take a year to get resolved and will definitely cause stress in these situations.
Destroy the Value of Your Commercial Property
It’s possible to sell your property without a NFR but it would need to be to someone who is (1) naïve about buying commercial property AND (2) buying the property with cash (otherwise a bank will make them get a Phase I ESA and the jig is up). You may still be able to sell your property with your counter-party in full understanding that there’s no NFR but they will chop a good 20% or $100,000 (whichever is more) off what they are willing to pay to take the risk of buying a contaminated property.
Why Is This A Big Deal All Of A Sudden?
Wondering why this is all-of-a-sudden on the IEPA’s radar? Several answers:
- COVID19 gave the IEPA a lot of extra time to go through their databases and see what housekeeping has been neglected.
- The IEPA hired a lot of new staff, many of them are fresh out of college. There’s no better way to help train these people than to have them do some database cleaning, essentially creating their own caseloads.
- Money – the State of Illinois finances are, as we like to say in the industry “no bueno”. Creating billable hours for the regulatory agencies seems a good way to pay for staff.
- Illinois State Governor Rod Blagojevich – You may remember him as “Blago The Destroyer” or “This thing is {expletive removed} golden” in reference to selling Barack Obama’s Senatorial seat in the federal government. He did a hitch in federal prison for the last one. Among his other foibles, he raided the Leaking Underground Storage Tank (LUST) Trust Fund of many millions of dollars so there was no money to do cleanups.
How Do We Fix My “NFR Not Recorded” Problem?
Site Remediation Program (SRP)
If your NFR has already been voided, you have real problems. The work may need to be done again. If you used the LUST Trust Fund to pay for
your cleanup, you can’t use it again. That well is dry. You had your opportunity. There is another program, you’d have to pay for it out of pocket, but it’s called the “Site Remediation Program” or SRP for short. For various reasons this is a faster, and in our view better, route to a NFR. This time, A3 Environmental Consultants will get that NFR recorded in 45 days for you. Generally projects like these cost between $15,000 and $25,000 but every one is unique. Keep in mind, not having a NFR could crush the resale value of your property, especially when a buyer doesn’t know what they are getting into. As hard as it sounds, paying to get the NFR again retains more value in the property than tasking the new buyer with sorting it out.
Hire an Environmental Consultant (like us!)
A3 Environmental Consultants can sort this out for you. Every NFR is different and often they come with stipulations to notify the neighbors with certified mail along with the requirement to submit the paperwork to the county recorder of deeds. Lots of times your environmental consultant that you used for your LUST project is out of business and the paperwork is lost. We’re pretty good at digging it up again. There is often some negotiation that needs to be done with your IEPA project manager. We can do that, too. We have good working relationships with all of them.
It should be noted that there are paperwork snafu’s at the IEPA all the time. Someone who knows what they are doing (us) can plumb the labyrinth of the State of Illinois to fix however your paperwork went bad if you already did this in the past.
You’re wondering how much this will cost you. As I had mentioned, every project is different, but most of these matters can be resolved between $500 and $2000.
Record the NFR Yourself
What you will need to do is read through the paperwork and find out what stipulations the IEPA requires as part of your Recorder of Deeds submittal. You’ll need to follow those stipulations to the letter and then take all your paperwork and proof of mailing to the County Clerk’s office. There you will be charged some fee to have the paperwork recorded. The fee may be by page, or it may be a flat fee. Figure somewhere between $50 and $200. Then, you’ll need to send a certified copy of the NFR to the IEPA to be recorded. If you do it wrong, they’ll have you do it again.
If you need help with your NFR Not Recorded issue, give A3 Environmental Consultants a call. We’ll work with the IEPA to get your environmental issue sorted out and behind you. If you have other current or future concerns regarding Leaking Underground Storage Tanks or the LUST Trust Fund, we’d love to talk with you, call us now! A3 Environmental Consultants can be reached at (630) 507-9033 or by email at LUST@A3E.com.
