Activity and Use Limitations in Western Mass, and What an AUL Means

When a contaminated site in Massachusetts is cleaned to a standard that depends on how the land is used, the condition is recorded on the deed as an Activity and Use Limitation, and it binds every owner after. There are 410 of them recorded across 48 of these 101 towns, from 1993 to 2025, and every one is listed below.

An AUL is not a warning that the site is dirty. It is closer to the opposite: it marks a cleanup that finished, on the condition that the land is not used in the ways the residual contamination would make unsafe. A former filling station cleaned to commercial standards may carry an AUL saying no residential use, or no basement, or no vegetable garden, or do not disturb the soil below a marked depth without a plan. The restriction is the price of not excavating every cubic yard, and it is permanent unless formally amended.

Reading the Register

The pattern is the region's industrial map. Springfield holds 92 of the 410, and the cities and mill towns carry most of the rest; 53 towns, most of them hilltowns, have none at all. The status column shows the underlying cleanup's state in MassDEP's codes: RAO and its successor classes mean the response action reached its endpoint, with the restriction as a standing condition.

If a property you are weighing appears here, the documents are public: the state's site page carries the full file, and the AUL itself is at the registry of deeds with the property's title. What matters is the specific restriction, which varies from "no single family dwelling" to conditions that would never affect an ordinary buyer. The document says which; the register only says one exists.

What This Does Not Mean

Absence from this list is not a clean bill: it means no recorded use limitation, nothing more. A site can be listed in the wider 21E cleanup registry without an AUL, cleaned fully, still in progress, or never reported. And presence is not danger: an AUL on the block does not touch your parcel, and one on a property you are buying is a document to read, not a reason to walk before reading it.

The register also names sites as they were: the business on the deed in 1998, not whoever owns the parcel now. For one address rather than a register, the address check runs the cleanup layers around a specific property, and each town's record carries its own environmental history.