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Editorials, June 17, 2008

Keeping watch

Is the state Agency of Natural Resources too cozy with Omya Inc., the marble processing company with a plant in Florence?

That is the view of whistleblower John Brabant, an agency official who believes his superiors at ANR have not been following agency rules in giving Omya a break on the waste it has been dumping in abandoned quarries.

Others in the agency dispute Brabant's view of Omya and the potential danger to groundwater caused by the mineral waste that is the by-product of Omya's operations. Brabant has not produced a smoking gun showing collusion between Omya and ANR, but he raises concerns that ought to be on everyone's minds, both environmentally and politically.

The issue is the waste, called tailings, that is left over after Omya grinds calcium carbonate into fine powder that it sells for a variety of industrial uses. Several years ago the Department of Environmental Conservation ruled that Omya did not need a state permit to dump the tailings into nearby quarry pits because the material counted as mining waste, which is not subject to the solid waste permitting process.

On second thought, the department ruled that Omya needed a permit because the tailings contained chemicals used in the manufacturing process, and those chemicals had the potential for polluting groundwater.

Brabant argues that the agency should have initiated an enforcement action against Omya because the company was dumping material without a permit, in violation of state regulations. Instead, ANR issued an interim permit that allowed the company to continue to dump for two years.

Omya was doubly exposed to trouble because nearby residents had filed suit in federal court alleging that the chemicals dumped by Omya endangered the groundwater that supplied their wells.

The agency based its decision to issue an interim permit on an independent report commissioned by the Legislature and released this spring finding that the chemicals released by Omya were causing no harm to people or the environment. The chemicals were there in small amounts, and they needed to be watched, but the agency decided to let Omya continue dumping for the time being.

Brabant says the agency was subject to political pressure from the Douglas administration. When the agency issued its initial finding letting Omya off the hook, Jeff Wennberg, former mayor of Rutland, was commissioner of environmental conservation, and it was possible to believe that Gov. James Douglas and Wennberg together decided it was best to bend the rules to help a company with 300 employees in Rutland County.

But there is no evidence that that is the case, and the agency denies it. Subsequently, ANR ruled that Omya's tailings amounted to more than mine waste, and it took what it considered to be appropriate action.

Brabant points to some documents in the agency's file that he suggests show Omya trying to cozy up to ANR. The documents, which originated with Omya, cite the lawsuit Omya was facing and the legal vulnerability of both Omya and ANR. Omya says the documents were merely citing the company's interest in protecting itself against legal action and that it was appropriate to remind the state of the company's interests.

Viewed another way, the Omya document suggests both ANR and the agency have an interest in protecting Omya from legal action from neighbors. This is a more disturbing interpretation. It is not ANR's job to protect anyone from lawsuits. Its job is to protect the state's groundwater. If Omya was trying to rope the agency into its own legal defense, that would have been an unsavory undertaking.

Brabant's charges no doubt are a headache for his bosses, but they serve to alert the public to areas where the agency and the public need to be on guard. That there is no unanimity within the agency ought not to be an embarrassment to the government. Rather, public exposure to differences of opinion highlights legitimate areas of concern. We don't have to agree with Brabant's interpretation of events to be interested in his revelations or his views.

Certainly, an agency memo suggesting that Brabant's statements might be cause for the creation of whistleblower "guidelines" appears to be a bit of paranoid nonsense. If a whistleblower were forced to follow agency guidelines, his or her capacity as whistleblower might well be curbed, which is what whistleblowers generally blow whistles about.

It is important to keep watch of Omya and its waste deposits. It is also important to keep watch of state officials who are watching over Omya. That is the job of the people and the press, and they are often helped by state employees willing to blow the whistle when they think the watchdog itself needs to be watched more closely.