SANFORD — The former CGA property on New Dam Road is poised for a cleanup after two decades of struggles.

The town council on Tuesday authorized Town Manager Steve Buck to sign a contract with the Massachusetts-based electronics recycling company Green Network Exchange.

The company will remove the circuit boards for the salvage value, and following the cleanup, the town will convey the 17-acre site to the company, which Sanford officials said Tuesday plans a recycling facility there.

The agreement for removal of the circuit boards will bring near closure after 20 years of attempts to clean up the unsightly property.

“Everyone on New Dam Road should be very happy, and so should the rest of Sanford,” said Council Vice Chairwoman Anne Marie Mastraccio Tuesday, as the town council voted unanimously to approve the contract.

Removal of the circuit boards is expected to take about 18 months, according to the terms of the contract.  

Once Green Network Exchange has finished removing the circuit boards, the town will use a $200,000 federal brownfields grant to assess the soil condition underneath the circuit board mounds and will likely seal the mound sites with pavement.

Derelict for 20 years, hundreds of thousands of abandoned circuit boards lay in vast mounds deposited over about three acres of the 17-acre site.

The town took possession of the property through the tax lien process in 2010. When the council voted to take the property, the prior owner owed more than $100,000 in unpaid taxes.

CGA, Inc. has been abandoned since the early 1990s. The copper processing facility had been operated by Billy and Glennis Lloyd, who operated CGA, Inc. from the mid-1970s through 1987, and until 1991 by Stephen Thibeault, the Lloyd’s son-in-law.

In 1991, the site was abandoned, and the DEP spent $130,000 removing vats of chemicals and other wastes, but the circuit boards remained.

The property had been owned by Freeport resident Lawrence DiPietro since 1992, when he bought it for $1 and agreed to clean it up. That never happened, despite a court order that is apparently still in effect.

Because the circuit boards are considered “special waste” and not hazardous waste, the project has not been not eligible for federal environmental funds to remove them. The $200,000 brownfields grant the town received earlier this year will go to assess and clean up the land underneath.

The town council in 2010 voted to spend $27,500 to remove an old, underground storage tank and a burned-out mobile home on the property; hire an excavator and truck; and pay disposal fees for 160 tons of debris ”“ everything from tires to trash to miscellaneous junk ”“ but not circuit boards; and to secure the building.

Green Network Exchange has offices in Woburn, Mass. and a processing facility in Fitchburg. Owner David Williams could not be reached for comment by press time this morning.

— Senior Staff Writer Tammy Wells can be contacted at 324-4444 (local call in Sanford) or 282-1535, Ext. 327 or twells@journaltribune.com.