Toxic paint can cleanup at newly acquired home

[Ian S.]

Hi all,

We recently acquired a SFH in North Carolina and shortly after purchase got a violation letter from the city stating there are paint cans that need to be cleaned up at the back of the property. Some of the paint cans are unlabelled and thus must be considered toxic. Some of them are in the neighbor's side of the property line, but that house is also vacant and we can't get through to the owner to share costs.

The property manager we are working with got a ridiculous quote of $8000 to hire a company to do the clean-up (that’s approx. 10% of the purchase price of the property!!) - plus more if "wetland testing" is required (apparently the back of the lot borders a tiny strip labelled wetland on the GIS map) . This all seems outrageous to us.  Our PM is getting a second quote.

Has anyone ever run into this before and can provide any advice on the best way to proceed?

Thank you very much for your help!

[Ian S.]

For anyone in the future wondering how this worked out, I followed @Thomas S. advice (thank you!!) above and flew out and did the job myself.  I ended up doing a tour of several dumps per day (since there was a paint can limit) but they were very flexible with non-labelled paint.  About 12 hours of manual labor later, the problem was fixed!  Instead of spending $8000, I spent closer to $500 for the truck rental, the airplane ticket (on points!) , and a hotel. And it felt good to get my hands - literally - dirty!

Part of the other crap in the back yard was a shopping cart - very convenient!