THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, March 28, 1995 TAG: 9503280254
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY SCOTT HARPER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 90 lines
A national environmental group charged Monday that top Virginia officials knowingly approved illegal water-pollution permits for industry and sewage plants and lied about their validity.
The criminal complaint, filed with federal and local prosecutors in Roanoke, stems mostly from documents supplied by a former manager in the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality who resigned last month in protest of practices he calls ``patently wrong.''
The complaint questions six permits in particular, all in the western part of the state. But it suggests that Virginia shows a pattern of routinely bending federal rules regarding dissolved oxygen, a pollutant often blamed for fish kills.
``Something has to change, and that's why I'm doing this,'' said David Sligh, the former permit administrator in west-central Virginia. ``I just got tired of looking the other way.''
Robert Burnley, DEQ's state director of program support and evaluation, and other department officials in Richmond rejected the complaint from PEER - Public Employees For Environmental Responsibility. Burnley termed it ``a professional disagreement gone overboard.''
The officials noted that the Environmental Protection Agency has approved of the way Virginia regulates industrial pollution in state waterways for more than 20 years.
``I'm kind of at a loss,'' Burnley said. ``We'll look at their information, but I don't anticipate any changes in our processes.''
The complaint was delivered Monday to Donald S. Caldwell, the commonwealth's attorney in Roanoke, and Robert P. Crouch, U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia.
Crouch would not discuss the matter in detail. But he said such complaints are ``looked at seriously'' and would likely be referred to an investigator. If that probe finds evidence of misconduct, charges could be filed. But none of that has occurred as yet, Crouch stressed.
The complaint cites six veteran administrators in the state environmental department for making ``false statements, representations and certifications in documents filed or required to be maintained under the Clean Water Act,'' the federal law defining water-pollution protection.
It quotes from conversations and internal memos in which state officials were worried about upsetting politicians and industries.
In one exchange, an administrator suggested ways to quietly issue one particularly weak decision because it ``could cause trouble if EDF (Environmental Defense Fund, a Washington-based watchdog group) or somebody saw it.''
Although PEER, based in Washington, has seen its numbers swell with dissatisfied state environmental regulators since Gov. George F. Allen and his business-first approach took power, the named administrators worked in the department well before Allen's election in 1993, Sligh said.
``This isn't political,'' he said, ``although I will say that the pressure to go along, the threat of retaliation and the nastiness has increased since Allen.''
The problem is that permits were written and approved with discharge limits exceeding what laws and regulations allowed, the complaint alleges. And, Sligh charges, managers knew it.
Sligh said that for years there was no written guidance on how biochemical oxygen demand, or BOD, was to be regulated in industrial discharges.
The amount of BOD released into a stream can determine how much dissolved oxygen forms there. That total, in turn, helps define the types of plants and aquatic life that can grow in a waterway.
Sligh recalled that when he and others started pressing for more precise standards - which turned out to be more stringent than the old way - their suggestions were at first embraced and later refuted.
``We were told to go back to the old way,'' Sligh said, recalling meetings with top administrators who said that tighter controls were too costly and harder to enforce.
Herein lies the ``professional disagreement'' that department officials say was at the heart of the complaint.
``They looked at federal rules and came up with a strategy that we felt was overly stringent,'' Burnley said. ``We didn't think spending 10 times the money to meet these requirements would make that much of a difference in water quality.''
Environmentalists have attacked the state over its water-discharge program before. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation and others have even petitioned the federal government to take over the program or at least force the state to straighten up. The petition awaits action by the EPA.
Roy Hoagland, an attorney for the Bay foundation in Richmond, said his complaints did not include the question of dissolved oxygen but focused on other perceived shortcomings. by CNB