Asbestos Removal in Mint Hill, NC

Mint Hill is the outlier among Mecklenburg County’s suburban towns. Its 10,820 housing units carry a median build year of 1992, and 3,103 of them, 28.7 percent, went up before 1980. Set that against Huntersville at 7.3 percent or Cornelius at 7.8 percent and the gap is close to four to one. The heaviest single concentration is the 1,819 units built during the 1970s, 16.8 percent of the town and the largest 1970s share of any Mecklenburg municipality. Another 731 date from the 1960s, and 18.2 percent arrived in the 1980s.

So Mint Hill is the one place on this side of the county where an ordinary single-family house is a sensible starting point for the question. Not because age by itself proves anything, but because the 1960s and 1970s were when asbestos-containing building products were most widely specified in residential construction, and Mint Hill holds more of that period than its neighbors do.

No mill, no register district, and a village that was moved

Mint Hill was never a textile town, and there is no National Register historic district within it. The principal historic resource is the Mint Hill Historical Society’s Carl J. McEwen Historic Village at 7601 Matthews-Mint Hill Rd, a collection of relocated and preserved buildings rather than a district standing where it was built. That is worth a note for anyone maintaining those structures: moving a building does not change what went into it, and a relocated nineteenth or early twentieth century structure is surveyed on exactly the same basis as one that never left its original foundation.

The absence of a mill shapes expectations too. No single industrial complex concentrates the caseload here the way one does in some nearby towns. Work in Mint Hill is distributed instead: individual houses, church and fellowship buildings, small commercial along the main roads, and the occasional teardown of an older house on a large lot. A 1971 ranch on two acres is a 1971 ranch, and the buyer replacing it faces the same requirements as anyone renovating one.

Three separate rules that homeowners keep merging into one

Mint Hill homeowners are frequently told some version of “you’re exempt.” Three distinct rules sit underneath that phrase and they produce three different outcomes. Getting them mixed up is how people end up doing unpermitted work in good faith.

The permit fee waiver. Under 10A NCAC 41C .0606(a)(5), the owner of a single family dwelling in which the owner resides, or will reside once the removal is finished, is exempt from permit fees. Read the wording closely. The fee is waived; the application is not. You still apply and you still wait. Note also that it covers a house you intend to move into, not only one you already occupy.

The accreditation carve-out. G.S. 130A-447(c)(2) exempts a person performing asbestos work in his own personal residence from accreditation requirements. The subject of that sentence is you, personally, in the house you personally occupy. It transfers to nobody else. Hire anyone and it evaporates: the firm and each individual worker then need current North Carolina accreditation, and neither ownership nor occupancy changes that. North Carolina issues that accreditation by category (Worker, Supervisor, Inspector, Management Planner, Project Designer, Air Monitor, Supervising Air Monitor) and the categories are not interchangeable.

The federal residential exclusion. Because Mecklenburg County Air Quality runs its own delegated NESHAP program, most projects in this county need a notification to the county in addition to the state permit. Houses are the exception. The federal definition of a facility leaves out residential buildings of four dwelling units or fewer, and a detached single-family home is comfortably inside that gap, so the county notification falls away. The state permit does not. In a county where nearly everything requires two filings, a Mint Hill house is the ordinary case that requires one, and the one it requires is the state one.

Quantities, timing and teardowns

Three quantities decide whether a house-scale job is a permitted one: 160 square feet, 260 linear feet, and 35 cubic feet of regulated asbestos-containing material. Exceed any single one and the permit is required. They are read separately and never totalled. Notification runs 10 working days ahead of the start date, and North Carolina counts working days as Monday through Friday with holidays falling on those days included in the count, which is unusual and catches people out. A North Carolina accredited inspector must survey before work begins. If the plan is a full teardown rather than a remodel, demolition notification on form DHHS-3768 is required whether or not any asbestos is found, and demolition here means removing a load-supporting structural member rather than simply gutting an interior.

Houses of this vintage in Mint Hill often sit over vented crawl spaces, and dampness there frequently surfaces during the same visit, which is where crawl space moisture work and sometimes mold remediation come into it. Details of the abatement process itself are set out on our main abatement page, and Mint Hill sits at the eastern edge of the area we cover.

For a survey, a permit application or a straight answer about which of the three rules above applies to your property, call 704-393-0303 or tell us about the property. Our office is at 913 E. Catawba St., Belmont, NC 28012.