SANFORD – Town officials trying to unload a polluted 16-acre site on New Dam Road that was home to a copper recycling plant during the 1980s are preparing to explore other options.

Nobody responded to the town’s call for proposals on the so-called CGA property by last Friday’s deadline, town attorney Jim Katsiaficas said Tuesday.

“There were no bites,” he said. “But we’re still investigating to see where people had a hard time with the proposal. If there is something out there we can reasonably rectify or change, we’ll do that. But if not, I guess it’s back to the drawing board.”

Cleanup costs at the site, where the copper on circuit boards was stripped and turned into a copper sulfate solution, are estimated in the thousands, perhaps even the millions, of dollars.

The stripped boards were tossed onto the land, and the property owner then abandoned the site. The latest owner, Lawrence DiPietro, abandoned the land after operating Southern Maine Regional Recycling Inc. there in the mid-1990s.

Taxes on the property remain unpaid while the pile of circuit boards – once estimated to exceed two acres and averaging 8 feet deep – remain. The town has not yet foreclosed on the property, because it does not want to assume the cost of cleanup.

The Maine Department of Environmental Protection has offered to help pay for the cost of removing copper from the soil. But cleanup of the stripped circuit boards will have to be someone else’s responsibility.

In December, the town began looking for someone who might want the land in exchange for the cost of cleanup. Katsiaficas said some people had expressed interest but never ended up submitting proposals.

“I think the neighborhood was looking forward to a proposal to get it cleaned up and I think the town was looking forward to get it back on the tax rolls,” he said. “Everyone is disappointed.”