‘It will look like a park in here,’ says woman cleaning up former salvage yard

Rat-infested derelict RVs, piles of rusty scrap metal and stinky garbage once filled a former salvage yard near The Evergreen State College.

Last February, Olympia resident Angela Ducharme purchased the 2.3-acre property at 2930 Kaiser Road for just under $14,000 during the Thurston County treasurer’s tax foreclosure auction.

Since then, she’s removed truckloads of garbage and metal from the site. More specifically: 50 tons of garbage and 12 tons of recyclable metal.

“If this was the first time you saw it, you’d think ‘What a mess,’ but you had to see what we started with,” Ducharme said, looking over a muddy area where there’s a boat, a soggy foam mattress, a grocery cart, a couple of graffiti-covered shipping containers and a pile of old electronics. “Knowing what it was before, you’re like, ‘Wow, that’s a lot different.”

Ducharme used to call the property “Tweaker Town,” and last spring she evicted more than a dozen people who were living in RVs, buses and other vehicles from the undeveloped land that has no septic or sewer.

Then, she and her boyfriend Jeremy Panter got to work, sorting out anything that could be sold, donated, recycled or repurposed, and filling dumpsters with everything else.

They also enlisted the help of Ducharme’s dad, who has been especially fond of using a small excavator to scrape the ground and scoop up trash, his daughter said.

“It’s been fun,” Panter told The Olympian last May. “I’m just glad to see the place get cleaned up.”

The property’s previous owner, John Burnell, had a longstanding feud with Thurston County officials. In 2008, Thurston County Superior Court Judge Gary Tabor ordered a clean-up of the property after prosecutors testified that previous efforts to bring the site into compliance with county code had been unsuccessful. Tabor gave the county authority to bill Burnell for the cost of the cleanup up to $80,000.

Burnell was arrested twice during the cleanup on suspicion of obstruction. He filed several police reports over the matter.

“They’ve destroyed everything I had left,” Burnell told The Olympian in May 2008. “It’s all in debate right now with the county.”

After the 2008 cleanup, the trash heaps began to grow again. By the time the property went to auction, there was a $111,000 lien on the property, Ducharme said.

She recently struck a deal with the county for a three-quarter acre adjoining lot.

Private negotiation of the tax-title property was allowed because it is “not practical to build on due to buffers, wetlands and drainage,” according to an Agenda Item Summary for the Board of County Commissioners.

The sale price was about $13,500, but county officials are giving her $9,000 in credit for the cleanup. With excise and recording fees, she paid about $4,500 for the land, according to county documents.

However, she’ll have to pay the amount of the credit if the cleanup isn’t completed by the county’s one-year deadline, Ducharme said.

Ducharme said she’s hoping to have both properties cleaned up in the next few months.

“I don’t want to be doing this this summer,” Ducharme said. “I want to be doing something else.”

She said she’s most excited about planting grass in the area, and that she’s always thought the property had great potential.

“I was always, like, ‘Why does it have to look like that? It could be such a great piece of property, it could be so beautiful,’” Ducharme said.

Since she began the cleanup, deer, birds and other wildlife have returned to the property, she said.

Ducharme doesn’t have a firm plan on what she wants to do with the property. If development regulations change for Olympia’s urban growth area, she said she thinks it would make a nice place to build a tiny house village — maybe even a multi-generational one where senior citizens can live beside Evergreen students.

“It’s going to look really neat,” Ducharme said. “It will look like a park in here.”

This story was originally published January 8, 2018 at 6:06 AM with the headline "‘It will look like a park in here,’ says woman cleaning up former salvage yard."