When Mike Mickey heard a CBC radio news report Tuesday morning, he halted all construction work that had been taking place at his property on the former Upper Tank Farm near Valleyview.

The news organization had reported on some internal Yukon government documents a local woman had showed it. They had the potential to raise doubts about Whistle Bend being the location for the future continuing care facility.

It has been an uphill battle for Mickey – cleaning soil that has been deeply tainted with the reputation of being contaminated from the former fuel that was stored onsite.

Since acquiring the land from White Pass in 1996, however, Mickey had hopes that he could someday turn it into a residential centre.

After hearing word in 2013 that there were funds to be made available for the construction of a continuing care facility in Whitehorse, Mickey had his eureka moment.

He started to get to work – the 140-acre land would need to be deemed “clean” for anything to be built on it. His intent was to donate a piece of the land to the government for the continuing care facility.

In an interview today, he noted that Premier Darrell Pasloski had supported the idea of building the continuing care facility on Mickey’s tank farm site.

What he didn’t know until this week was that the government officials on the location selection committee had decided on Whistle Bend much earlier than he’d been aware of.

After filing an access to information request in April of this year, Whitehorse resident Tamara Goeppel seized a hefty pile of internal documents that chronicle the year or so leading up to the official selection of Whistle Bend as the future home for the planned 150-bed continuing care facility. On April 9, 2014, Cynthia Tucker, an assistant deputy minister in the Department of Highways and Public Works, wrote an email memo to public works manager Anwar Rizvi that detailed “very complex environmental comments” about the tank farm site.

Tucker noted that at that point, the land was still considered a designated contaminated site. The former Liberal cabinet minister advised that the government might not want to risk taking on a site that hasn’t officially been signed off on as no longer contaminated.

Rizvi responded to Tucker an hour later, stating, “It will be prudent not to include this site in our study.”

This email included another important piece of information – a note that he had received the geotechnical report for four properties that were being considered.

The report prepared by the property management division of Highways and Public Works put Porter Creek at the top, then Riverdale, followed by Copper Ridge and finally, Whistle Bend.

“The (report) indicates that Whistle Bend is the most unfavourable site due to high silt contents, water table and require frost heaving,” Rizvi wrote.

“While these are the negatives, the positive part is the overall master plan where the new Continuing Care Facility is will enjoy a good mix of commercial and residential mix right next to an elementary school.”

The same day of Tucker’s and Rizvi’s correspondence, senior management gave instructions to strike Porter Creek, Riverdale and Copper Ridge off of the possible locations list.

It is unclear from the emails and reports as to why those three locations were eliminated.

On April 24, 2014, Cathy Morton-Bielz, a Health and Social Services assistant deputy minister, indicated she would like to see information paired with reasons as to why the location selection committee wasn’t including certain sites.

In the ATIPP documents provided by Goeppel, there is no response to that particular email nor any explanation as to why any sites were ruled out.

“Whistle Bend was indeed ranked behind other sites in terms of geotechnical factors,” Ben Horowitz, a Highways and Public Works spokesperson, told the Star early this afternoon.

“Even though Whistle Bend may have had higher site and foundation costs compared to the Porter Creek site, for example, that difference in cost was estimated to be less than one per cent of the overall cost of construction for the entire project.”

Horowitz also noted that geotechnical considerations represented just one of more than 10 “essential evaluation criteria” that came about during the location analysis.

“It doesn’t make sense that they wouldn’t be on board with this property,” Mickey said this morning.

He provided the Star with copies of an EMB report that indicates that the property had no geotechnical concerns or anticipated foundation problems, unlike Whistle Bend.

In regards to the potential for “contamination,” Mickey provided the government with a letter from the Department of Environment from November 2014 .

It stated the portion of land he wanted to donate for the care facility was finally eligible for a certificate of compliance – indicating that the land would officially be ready for residential construction by the end of January 2015.

This information, of course, was too late – the government had announced its official selection of Whistle Bend for the continuing care facility on Dec. 18.

Pasloski addressed questions from reporters concerning the facility on Thursday.

The picking of Whistle Bend as the future home for the facility, Pasloski said, was due to its size and a pressing need to get the project moving.

Asked why other parcels of land were dismissed as possible locations despite their expandable size, Pasloski said it came down to that “pressing need.”

If the government had waited to determine whether areas like the tank farm could have been deemed appropriate sites for the facility, he said, it would have added another year or two to the project.

But, from Mickey’s documents proving the land could have been developed as of January, it appears as though that tight timeline would have only been pushed back a couple of months.

“This should have been Whistle Bend,” Mickey said, gesturing behind him to the giant mountains of dirt on the property.

Pasloski said he could not comment as to when Mickey was formally notified that his site was no longer being considered as a location for the facility.

“My concern based on the options that I had was that we needed to get that process moving,” he said in an interview this morning from St. John’s.

Although Horowitz did not have the exact dates at hand as to when Mickey may have been told his site was scratched, he did confirm that Mickey was notified sometime after the decision was made to proceed with Whistle Bend.

Horowitz added that the tank farm location was the only site considered that was not already owned by the Yukon government or the City of Whitehorse.