TWIN FALLS, Idaho — A 2005 Idaho law meant to alert renters to homes where meth has been manufactured and encourage owners to clean them up has met with, at best, mixed results.
Renters sometimes are told only after they sign a lease that their new home or apartment was once used as a site to cook the illegal stimulant, The Twin Falls Times-News reported. Chemicals associated with making methamphetamine are hazardous and can make such a property dangerous to inhabit.
Homes must stay on the list until cleared by a certified industrial hygienist. Dozens of residences have been on the list for years.
Until they're removed, homes on the list are supposed to remain vacant. However, it's up to the properties' owners — not police or health officials — to ensure that happens.
Monica Shaff of Twin Falls says she and her now ex-husband didn't know until after they signed a lease that the property they moved into in 2009 previously held a meth lab.
She says that after the paperwork was finished, her landlord told her to keep the kids away from a shed where the drug was manufactured.
"He also told us it had been cleaned properly," Shaff said after learning the two-story home is still on the list. "I'm floored right now."
Shaff and her family have since moved out.
The 2005 Legislature passed a series of measures aimed at combatting what at the time was a scourge, in particular in rural communities.
Though law enforcement agencies say much of Idaho's meth now comes from Mexican super laboratories — seizures of Idaho meth labs plummeted from as many as 169 in 1999 to fewer than a dozen in recent years — the drug's legacy can live on in the form of an unsafe property where it was made.
As of Monday, more than 40 homes were on Idaho's meth-lab property list, with three dating to 2006; eight each from 2007 and 2008; nine from 2009; six from 2010; and 10 from 2011, including a home in rural Bonner County near Priest River listed just last month.
In Shaff's case, authorities say her former landlord, Mitch Campbell, was the victim of drug-making tenants who were busted in 2008.
He carted off the contents of the shed where the tenants cooked the highly addictive brew, then thought it would be safe to rent to a new tenant.
But since he didn't have the property cleaned according to state guidelines, it remains on the list for clandestine drug labs. The Clandestine Drug Lab Cleanup Act leaves it up to property owners to keep houses on the list vacant until they've been judged by a certified industrial hygienist to be free of dangerous substances.
Campbell said he didn't know until last week that his property was on the state list.
The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare provides a list of private companies who specialize in hazardous waste cleanup.
But the cost can be from $5,000 to $10,000, depending on the size of the contaminated site. And few homeowner insurance policies cover the expense.
Four years ago, Twin Falls resident Don Patterson's son, Dale, was arrested and later convicted of making and selling meth from a trailer in the backyard of a property they own across the street from an elementary school, The Times-News reported. Don Patterson said he disposed of the trailer, but the property remains on the Health and Welfare list.
Don Patterson said as far as he's concerned, it can stay there: If Health and Welfare wants him to clean his property according to state standards, he said, they should call the police.
According to Idaho's rules, an owner who hasn't properly cleaned the lab site could face civil liabilities for health claims by future owners or renters.
But state officials say there's little they can do about people who reoccupy the homes.
They just tear down the yellow sign posted by police identifying the home as an illegal drug lab, then move back in.
And while property owners are supposed to tell potential buyers or renters that a property was once home to a meth lab, they are under no deadline to clean up the property. As a result, the law is little more than a paper tiger that's so far been unsuccessful in keeping people away until the state says it's safe to move back.