Monday, July 24, 2006

Four Things Everyone Should Know About Hamden's "Big Dig"

(With warm thanks to our neighbors up on Prospect Hill for sharing the results of all their hard investigative work)

1. THE DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION IS NOW UNDER INVESTIGATION BY THE STATE AUDITORS’ OFFICE FOR ITS WORK AT THE NEWHALL SITE.

The Auditors’ office has been investigating since mid-April and their report should be out later this summer. We expect that the AG’s office will soon step in as well. Hopefully they can figure out how to recover some of the $2,455,000 in bond money squandered by the DEP at the Newhall site.

2. THE DEP CHANNELED THE NEWHALL FUNDS TO A FEW FAVORED CONTRACTORS, WITH WHAT APPEAR TO BE BLATANT VIOLATIONS OF STATE CONTRACTING LAWS.

Much of the State’s bond money went to the DEP’s lead contractor at the site, Loureiro Engineering Associates (LEA), under a limited Contract that was designed to provide rapid, short-term (30 day) response to hazardous spills. Through seven unauthorized “addenda” to a modest original work proposal of only $48,229.95 submitted in May 2003, LEA was ultimately paid $1,306,682.03 (as of March 2006) by the State of Connecticut over a period of more than two and a half years for work on the Newhall Remediation site in Hamden, CT. Because LEA was initially hired to do some soil sampling at a couple of neighborhood plots, it never had to compete against other potentially much more qualified bidders for its jobs, such as:
1. Serving as the lead Contractor overseeing the investigation of the Newhall site.
2. The lucrative soil investigation of over 120 homes when DEP expanded the site.
3. Serving as the Contractor responsible for the development, cost analysis, and evaluation of alternative remediation plans.

Moreover, through a bidding process that LEA administered, LEA also awarded contracts to perform “emergency remedial measures” at the site to its wholly-owned subsidiary, LEA-Cianci.

And this is apparently only the beginning. Department emails obtained by one of our neighbors under the Freedom of Information Act show that the Department planned to allocate large sums to LEA in this manner, several times per year, until at least 2009. In June of this year, in the midst of the ongoing investigation by the State Auditor’s office, LEA was awarded a $5 million remediation contract by the DEP.

3. INSTEAD OF CLEANING UP THE SITE SEVERAL YEARS AGO, THE DEP EMBARKED ON A COSTLY AND UNNECESSARY EXPANSION OF NEWHALL.

The few genuine areas of contaminated landfill were already well defined in 2003. Instead of cleaning these areas up three years ago, the DEP spent much of its $2.5 million of State Bond funds expanding the site to include new residential neighborhoods and homes that were known NOT to be former landfill areas. By doing so, the DEP:

1) Created the many years of unnecessary delays that have so frustrated residents

2) Squandered the millions in bond money that were earmarked for planning the clean-up of the contaminated areas

3) Took a clean-up that should be manageable and affordable and artificially bloated it in size by throwing in over 100 homes and neighborhoods that could not possibly be on landfill.

Among the areas that the DEP now claims fall within the boundaries of a former “dumpsite” are: a) One of Connecticut’s oldest Jewish cemeteries, established in 1855, currently operated by Temple Beth Sholom of Hamden; b) The Alling Street neighborhood, a historic neighborhood of homes built between 1850 and 1870, long before any dumping of contaminated waste occurred in the area; c) Prospect Hill, the regional highlands, where maps, aerial photographs, and documents tracing back to the middle of the 19th century confirm that this area was never a dump or landfill of any kind, and where the DEP found no subsurface contamination or waste at any of the 63 homes of the neighborhood.

4. THE DEP’S SOIL STANDARDS AT NEWHALL ARE DESIGNED TO CREATE MORE PAID WORK FOR STATE CONTRACTORS, NOT TO PROTECT HUMAN HEALTH AND THE ENVIRONMENT.

For example, the DEP set an artificially low lead standard (400 parts per million) for the Newhall site, guaranteeing that ordinary residential soils would be identified as contaminated wastes. Not only was this lead standard well below the true State and Federal standards (the EPA standard is 1200 ppm), but it was far below the average soil lead concentration for all homes of this age in the Northeastern United States (542 ppm for homes built prior to 1940, 573 ppm for homes built between 1940 and 1959). If the artificial standards that the DEP applied in this case were applied throughout the Northeast, the vast majority of homes built prior to 1959 would be classified as lying on contaminated waste and slated for remediation. The DEP also deliberately lied to residents, telling them that this artificially low level was the State’s standard.

DEP’s standards have nothing to do with public health: The Department of Public Health has determined that even much higher levels of lead in soil pose no significant risk to human health. And it isn't just lead. The levels that the DEP has set for cancer-causing agents at the Newhall site are so absurdly low that the probability of getting cancer in your lifetime from what the DEP is calling “contaminated” soil is fifty times more remote than the likelihood you will be killed by lightning—and that’s only if you ate a 100 mg tablet of your soil every day for thirty years. These ridiculously strict standards are clearly not about “environmental protection,” but they will generate millions of dollars in work for the select group of state contractors who get paid a lot of money to remove contaminated dirt.

IF THE DEP SET REASONABLE STANDARDS AND FOCUSED ON THE AREAS OF GENUINE CONTAMINATION, THE FULL AND COMPLETE REMEDIATION THAT OUR NEIGHBORHOOD HAS DEMANDED WOULD BE POSSIBLE, AFFORDABLE, AND COMPLETED ON SCHEDULE.

INTRODUCTION

Until very recently, most of us had very positive ideas about the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection. Like most Americans, we believe in preventing Global Warming, saving whales, and keeping our lakes and rivers clean. We have warm feelings for Smokey the Bear, and believe that no child should be left inside. But unlike most Americans, we have been forced to make a sharp distinction between the important task of protecting human health and the environment—the stated purpose of the DEP—and the actual reality of our State’s Department of Environmental Protection. The inconvenient truth is that the Connecticut DEP enjoys a national reputation for corruption. Not long ago it was profiled by the country’s leading environmental magazine in an article appropriately entitled "The Department of Environmental Corruption." And as Carole Bass has shown in the series of fabulous investigative articles in the New Haven Advocate that sparked an ongoing Grand Jury investigation, the DEP is one of the Connecticut bureaucracies where the Rowland legacy is still alive and well. It has been quite painful to learn the extent to which Ranger Rick (and Ranger Regina) have had their hands in the public till.

How did we come to this rude awakening? Because we live in Southern Hamden, where the DEP is about to embark on the largest remediation project in its history and its first experiment in “cleaning up” a large residential neighborhood. Millions of our tax dollars are about to flow to the DEP for its “Big Dig” at Hamden’s Newhall site and the prognosis is looking grim: Spades haven’t even hit the dirt in our neighborhoods, but the Department is already under investigation for misdirecting millions of dollars to favored state contractors and rigging its expanded site investigation so that many ordinary homes were wrongly stigmatized as former dumpsites in need of a multi-million dollar cleanup. As residents of the neighborhoods that are the object of the DEP’s first residential remediation, and as taxpayers and principled citizens of the State of Connecticut, we are now on high alert. Our experience to date tells us that if the DEP is left to its own devices, the very best we can expect is ineptitude—they simply lack the necessary expertise to handle a project like this. We also have good reason to fear the worst—that like so many of its past projects, the DEP will simply use this project to put more money in the hands of some politically-connected cronies, favor its contractors over its responsibility to our community, and put our lives and homes at risk.

But that will only happen if good people sit by idly and do nothing…and that’s not going to happen. From the moment people in the neighborhood began to figure out that something was terribly wrong and brought it to the attention of our elected officials, Senate Majority Leader Martin Looney and State Representative Peter Villano have been nothing short of heroic in their efforts to defend the community and bring the DEP to account. Mayor Henrici has begun to get more actively involved, and we hold out the hope that appeals to conscience and principle will bring Senator Joseph Crisco to rally to our cause as well.

All of this brings us to this site and the reason why we are here. In the last three years, the DEP has already spent over $400,000 of State bond funds on public relations firms for the Newhall site to keep our community in the dark. More money is already on its way. But money doesn’t buy truth, and the façade is cracking. We hope this site will widen the cracks and let the light shine through. Please join us in keeping a vigilant watch and helping to get the word out.