We talked about leaving them up, but the main factor in our decision can be explained by this
http://www.johnon.com/312/google-algorithm.html
The guy we had reviewing the sites wasn't very web/seo savvy. He was just trying to keep up with the submits and dodge the spammers. There was some pretty spammy stuff on the sites.
We talked about going through them and cleaning them up, spending time training the reviewer better, bla, bla, bla, but we don't have the time or the manpower to do that right now, so to avoid the risk of spammy sites adversely effecting the rest of our sites the only other choice was to close them.