CADILLAC — Cadillac’s Local Development Finance Authority is releasing quarterly water sampling results for the first time in more than five years as some are accusing the board of not doing enough to keep people safe.
The LDFA is responsible for the cleanup of groundwater in the city’s industrial park area.
After years of not testing for certain carcinogens in extraction and monitoring wells in the LDFA area, the board is getting the results of its first round of sampling.
Cadillac utilities director Jeffrey Dietlin said they tested dozens of extraction and monitoring wells for a number of carcinogens.
“We had some complications in sampling since 2000 and we’ve been working to get back to our quarterly sampling,” Dietlin said.
Dietlin said this is only half of the results from this quarter’s testing. The other half is expected to be completed by the next board meeting set for a month from now.
He said so far, the results showed pollutants are on the decline overall, but there were two tests they are looking at more closely. One involving an extraction well.
“The drinking water standard is 7.2 parts per billion, and this was 8.2. So just above the drinking water, it’s above the drinking water standard. This water is not being used for drinking water. It’s being cleaned up and it’s going to the groundwater cleanup plant,” Dietlin said.
He said they also had a monitoring well they are re-testing because the results just didn’t add up.
“We had one well that had 174 total chrome or total chromium, which just seems a weird number because there was no hexavalent chromium associated with that. The extraction wells that are just north and south of it, there was nothing in those wells,” Dietlin said.
Not everyone was happy with the results. During public comment-concerned citizen Bill Barnett reprimanded the board for not testing over the past five years, demanding accountability from some long-time members of the board.
“Nobody’s lifted a finger in five years. Nobody did quarterly testing,” Barnett said. “This is terrible news. We heard Monday night from Mr. Dietlin that this is promising news. This is God awful. It’s one of your wells that has produced 136 million gallons for ten years. Yes. To just one of them. 45 gallons a minute. 64,000 gallons a day. Not filtered, not scrubbed right into the clam.”
Matthew Schichtel is the chair of the LDFA, brought on last October to discover that the board had not kept up with quarterly testing that had always been done since 19-96.
He said we’ll never know the full impact of those missteps.
“The last test was in January of 2020 and now we just had a quarterly test in October of 2025,” Schichtel said. “So that’s a six-year gap, almost a six-year gap. It might have shown up in last year’s quarterly testing. It might have happened six years ago. So we really don’t know when we would have known this information. But the important thing is that we’re acting today. We’re implementing the procedures that we need to make sure people are safe.”