The Nation's Pulse / The Clinton-Gore Incinerator
Fitzmaurice, Evan
The Clinton-Gore Incinerator by Evan Fitzmaurice / n a July 19, 1992 campaign speech in Weirton, West Virginia, Al Gore blasted Waste Technologies Industries (WTI), a hazardous waste incinerator...
...Clearly the state and federal permits for WTI were on shaky ground...
...Some would call it a triumph of levelheadedness over environmental alarmism—noting that none of the allegations against the WTI site have been confirmed except for an initial, failed test-burn...
...Vertac, located in Jacksonville, Arkansas, manufactured the herbicide Agent Orange and was the first target for Superfund prosecution by the EPA in 1979...
...The Union Bank of Switzerland and Morgan Guarantee Trust Company of New York handled the financing of the Stephens share, to the tune of $128 million...
...Shortly after Vertac was forced to destroy 30,000 drums of waste, including 3,000 drums of dioxin, Governor Clinton allowed taxpayer dollars to fund the construction of an incinerator in residential Jacksonville at tremendous financial benefit to Vertac...
...The changes in punctuation and ownership could constitute such representations, especially if they jeopardize the EPA permits...
...A Yale Law School contemporary of the Clintons, Sussman helped WTI to secure contracts with three CMA members: DuPont, Chemical Waste Management, and BASF...
...A year later, the Clinton administration allowed Lafarge to settle the $1.8 million in fines for only $594,000...
...While governor, Clinton kept in his office an antique rocking chair that was a gift from former Ensco president Melvin Bell...
...I'll tell you this, a Clinton-Gore administration is going to give you an environmental presidency to deal with these problems...
...Howard Metzenbaum, said that Chicago EPA administrator Valdus Adamkus worked with WTI from the beginning to cover up permit violations and to quash EPA studies that found toxic risk to the food chain near the WTI incinerator...
...Little Rock reporting casualty L.J...
...These contracts, later abandoned due to fears that WTI would be shuttered, would have guaranteed almost 100 percent of WTI's burning capacity for the rest of its existence...
...In September 1992, Lafarge's plant in Demapolis, Alabama, was fined $1.8 million under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act for violating just about every possible regulation that existed for cement kilns—one EPA official described the plant as "totally out of control...
...Environmental watchdog groups had sought prosecution of Ensco for years, but it was not until Bill Clinton took his rocking chair to Washington that an Arkansas case against Ensco was finally settled...
...This April, workers at the Vertac incinerator told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that it was falling apart...
...t was at this point that the Clintons put Robert Sussman on the project...
...TI has links, too, with the W Rose Law Firm, where Hillary Clinton worked on many Stephens projects involving municipal and state bond work...
...44 The American Spectator June 1994 When the Clintons came to Washington, Sussman became deputy to EPA administrator Carol Browner...
...It was among the first firms to burn PCBs...
...The Arkansas attorney general's office announced on April 9, 1994, that it would begin an investigation...
...EPA acting general counsel Gerald H. Yamada made a perfunctory investigation into the conflict-of-interest, finding that Sussman had no need to recuse himself from WTI matters because he officially represented CMA, not DuPont and BASF...
...Since the original permit allowed for a port structure, and since WTI has run into opposition due to its use of roadways to haul hazardous waste, opening the Ohio River to WTI would solve a number of its problems...
...Kay Bailey Hutchison, is a research assistant at The American Spectator...
...But somehow Stephens managed to skirt the Army requirements and obtain an EPA operating permit...
...According to Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University who specializes in environmental litigation, Stephens could face criminal and civil charges if representations made to the WTI enterprise were misleading or fraudulent...
...Documents obtained by TAS, including a December 14 application for $139 million in state bond financing, listed Stephens as the proposed lead managing underwriter...
...dead in the water...
...Stephens sold its interest in WTI to Von Roll America in 1990...
...Under civil RICO statutes, if false claims about permits or ownership led Morgan and UBS to invest in WTI, they can sue Stephens for three times the amount of the investment...
...When Lafarge obtained a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers to dredge for sand and gravel in a section of the Skip The MIDDLE-MAN votedii Jackson Stephens PRESIDENT Ohio River directly facing WTI, the circle of conflicts-of-interest was finally closed...
...The Clinton-Gore Incinerator by Evan Fitzmaurice / n a July 19, 1992 campaign speech in Weirton, West Virginia, Al Gore blasted Waste Technologies Industries (WTI), a hazardous waste incinerator project in nearby East Liverpool, Ohio...
...Davis wrote in Mother Jones last November that some Ohioans, including Sen...
...A June 6, 1982 communiqué from the Chicago EPA office to Washington headquarters mentioned discussions of the waste prohibition...
...Yet in March of last year, after months of reviews and audits, the Clinton EPA opted not to oppose plans to begin commercial operations at the site...
...Stephens made an effort to secure bond financing for WTI through the Ohio Water Development Authority in 1987...
...But under the joint venture agreement between Stephens and the original WTI partners, Stephens remains liablefor the investment by UBS and Morgan Guarantee...
...Thus, under a supposedly green administration, WTI became the first incinerator in EPA regulatory history to fail a test burn and still be 'allowed to continue operation...
...CI The American Spectator June 1994 45...
...Gore's spokeswoman, Marla Romash, blamed the inaction on "cards that were dealt by the previous administration...
...Before the incinerator became a cause cOlthre for environmental and community activists in Ohio and West Virginia, WTI negotiated waste contracts with Sussman, then legal counsel for the Chemical Manufacturing Association (CMA...
...Vertac has burned drums of highly toxic 2,4,5-D waste for more than two years...
...Be that as it may, the GAO investigation suddenly found itself...
...When Browner recused herself from dealings with WTI—owing to her husband's legal work for the radical public interest group, Citizens United, which opposes the facility—Sussman became the EPA's point-man on WTI permits and licensing...
...While the dredging clearly benefits Lafarge's cement-making operation, the consequent deepening of the Ohio River will allow waterway access to the WTI incinerator...
...This means that if East Liverpool activists expose missteps in the regulatory history of WTI and succeed in forcing the government to revoke its permit, the Clintons' largest source of campaign funding could be left with a $400 million loss...
...Twenty acres of land from the Columbiana County Port Authority were to be used in connection with "river-related industry...
...It was the largest penalty ever levied by the Arkansas Department of Pollution Control and Ecology...
...Hugh Kaufman of the EPA's Hazardous Site Control Division, the man who blew the whistle on Love Canal in 1978, sees the Clintons' involvement in WTI as the result of a conflict-of-interest—not a blunder...
...These are not people," Kaufman says, "who would make policy mistakes from a lack of first-hand experience...
...Stephens Inc.—which raised over $100,000 for the Clinton campaign and whose Worthen Bank subsidiary extended it a crucial $3.5-million line of credit—built and financed the $160-million incinerator, which will be the largest of its kind in North America, through a 1981 joint Evan Fitzmaurice, former legislative staffer and speechwriter for Sen...
...At least one of those transfers involved a repunctuation of WTI's name—a technique, opponents claim, that is commonly used by money-launderers and other white-collar criminals to disguise ownership...
...It leaks so bad there's a chute with a barrel under it to collect all of the D-waste that's leaking out of the front of the kiln," said one worker at the facility...
...Since at least April 1991, while Hillary was a board member of the parent company, Standard Lafarge has been permitted to dredge the Ohio River for sand and gravel to make cement...
...Lafarge's Systech burning units disposed of more than 400 million gallons of hazardous waste between 1979 and 1992...
...venture with the Swedish incinerator maker Von Roll and two other companies...
...The incinerator's location—in a minority neighborhood, 100 yards from houses and 400 yards from an elementary school—made it a particularly photogenic instance of the "environmental terrorism" Gore had derided in his book Earth in the Balance...
...The mere fact that some members of CMA have an interest in the outcome of the WTI matter would not cause `a reasonable person with knowledge of the relevant facts' to question your impartiality...
...While Charles A. Waterman of Brickler and Eckler served as counsel for Stephens on a number of WTI projects, the Rose Firm was retained during the 1980s to do bond work for Stephens as well...
...Meanwhile, between 1981 and 1990, owners and partners on the project changed several times...
...It would not be the first time toxic-waste burners with close ties to the Clintons have received preferential treatment...
...A 1992 investigation by Ohio Attorney General Lee Fisher found that, in making the deal with Von Roll, "WTI clearly considered the possibility that the changes in its ownership structure .. . could not be accomplished without a modification to the permit...
...In December 1992, Vice President-elect Gore asked, "for the safety and health of local residents," that a General Accounting Office investigation of WTI be conducted before a crucial test burn permit was issued...
...The original Army Corps of Engineers permit provided for the construction of a transfer facility and warehousing area, but explicitly forbade the handling of hazardous waste...
...Ensco is a hazardous-waste facility in El Dorado, Arkansas, that was represented by the Rose Law Firm in the early 1980s...
...We'll be on your side for a change," Gore said...
...The Clintons, he notes, have a dozen years of top-level dealings with companies that are responsible for burning over three-quarters of the hazardous waste in the United States...
...Davis also reported that in 1983, an examiner from the state hazardous-waste board recommended rejecting the project's Ohio permit application...
...The Yamada report on Sussman's conflict-of-interest mentioned Hillary's work for the Stephenses, and noted that it was Hillary who recommended the compromised Sussman for his EPA job overseeing WTI...
...The very idea of putting WTI in a flood plain, it's just unbelievable to me...
...Beginning in 1990, Hillary Clinton received $31,000 a year to serve on the board of the Lafarge Corporation, a French company that is the second-largest producer of cement in the United States...
...On May 7, 1993, Ensco, while admitting no liability, agreed to pay $475,000 in cash and services for 200 instances of wrongdoing at the El Dorado plant...
...Others, citing the Clintons' personal ties to the waste project, are calling it a triumph for the powerful Stephens family of Little Rock...
...Although the Bush EPA did authorize the WTI permit, Romash ignored that Gore had already overturned other Bush administration authorizations for similar hazardous waste incinerators...
Vol. 27 • June 1994 • No. 6
