There is a sad tale in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette about a woman who bought a house where there had been a meth lab. Renters of the house had the lab and apparently got busted. The landlord at the time got recommendations from the county on how to clean the property, but the landlords efforts were insufficient. The new buyer started to get sick, apparently from the house. This, according to the article, led to the woman losing her job, having to go on disability, and being subjected to foreclosure. I wonder if it would be feasible to record some kind of notice of environmental condition in situations where toxic chemicals have been manufactured at a site. Though, I’m not sure how you would enact such a requirement without opening the flood gates to the recorder’s office and cluttering up the title work.
There could be an amendment to the Seller’s Disclosure FoOrm, currently required by law in every Indiana residential sale transaction. If the seller knows and fails to disclose, recission and/or inducement by fraud action are available to the buyer A close look at the current wording might even give the lady some recourse under the abatement language already in place for other substances. It would not take much to amend the disclosure form since the process is already in place.
I was told a few years ago that there was legislation moving toward a disclosure rule that realtors must acknowledge that a meth lab was at one time in production at a property. It might be an Ohio thing and it might also be bunk. I’m not sure. I live in Summit county which was/is considered the meth capital of America. Sad!
Ohio does not have any specific meth lab disclosure law. Summit County has created an awareness database so people can check before they purchase the home if it was ever a lab.
There are a few cases in Ohio pending that use existing laws requiring disclosure of any environmental hazard or materials as the basis for their action. I used to work in environmental remediation, and OEPA tends to be more strict than the EPA. I guess there wouldn’t be much of a point of having the OEPA if it weren’t. It will probably come down to whether or not the specific contaminants are on the RCRA/CERCLA lists. I am not familiar with the specific requirements of disclosure law.
I think that a specific meth law is narrow minded. If there are harmful contaminants that the current owner has knowledge of, or if the home was subject to a cleanup, it should be disclosed regardless of its origin. The list should be tied to some national standard, like the NIOSH database or some other credible source for hazardous material exposure thresholds.
Since Libertarianism is a frequent topic here, I will say this about “buyer beware”: One of the basic economic assumptions about free markets is perfect information. In other words, the same information is ubiquitous among market participants. Most economic theory falls apart when this isn’t the case. Caveat Emptor is not a reasonable standard when the information is hidden, and requires unreasonable expense and time to discover. If you had to test a home for meth chemicals and antecedents, it would cost thousands of dollars and weeks (if not months) waiting for the lab results. This would create an inefficient market. In addition, it would be an unreasonable expense for someone considering a purchase of a home, before negotiation began.
The only solution is to have a clause in the contract to rescind – but that also is sub-optimal, as the seller could be broke, dead, or in Tahiti by the time the condition were discovered.
By far the simplest and most elegant solution is to simply compel the seller to disclose the information to begin with, with civil and possibly criminal penalties for not doing so.