THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, October 3, 1996 TAG: 9610030390
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY SCOTT HARPER, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: 58 lines
Making his first court appearance, the former sewage plant operator at Smithfield Foods Inc. pleaded not guilty Wednesday to 23 counts of filing false pollution reports and discharging wastes into the Pagan River at Smithfield.
Terry Lynn Rettig, 45, of Virginia Beach, was then released on a $10,000 bond pending a trial scheduled for Nov. 14 in U.S. District Court in Norfolk. If convicted of all charges, he faces a maximum of 54 years in prison and a $5.75 million fine, according to the U.S. Justice Department.
Also Wednesday, Rettig was ordered to pay $150 a month to keep his court-appointed attorney, Charles R. Burke. Burke, also of Virginia Beach, has represented Rettig at taxpayers' expense since last October, when federal agents began questioning the sewage technician about his work at Smithfield Foods and for other clients, including the town of Surry.
Smithfield is in Isle of Wight County, just west of Suffolk. Surry is in Surry County, just west of Isle of Wight.
Rettig is accused of filing false pollution reports showing that sewage plants at Smithfield Foods, Surry, a truck stop and a mobile-home park in Suffolk all complied with environmental laws, even though he did not check the sites, according to a grand jury indictment against him.
State officials rely on the integrity of the monthly reports to determine if sewage plants are releasing safe and legal amounts of treated waste into public waters.
For Smithfield Foods, Rettig also is charged with destroying three years of records that detailed the chemicals and nutrients that were in slaughterhouse wastes. The wastes are supposed to be treated, filtered and piped into the Pagan River, a tributary of the James River and Chesapeake Bay.
The Pagan has been closed to shellfish harvesting since 1970 due to high bacteria levels related to hog waste. Rettig originally told state inspectors the records were lost, state officials have said. But the indictment, handed down Sept. 24, alleges Rettig knowingly disposed of the records.
Rettig is a former public employee with the Hampton Roads Sanitation District. He was hired by Smithfield Foods in 1983 and started his own sewage-management company in 1990. He tried to perform tasks for Smithfield and other clients until Smithfield asked him to resign amid a state and federal investigation in 1995.
The case comes at a time when Smithfield Foods is being sued by state Attorney General James S. Gilmore III in connection with past allegations of environmental violations.
The federal government also is considering a separate, tougher case against the company, one of the largest employers in South Hampton Roads, which has a three-decade history of environmental troubles at its processing plants in rural Isle of Wight County.
The legal storm also comes as Smithfield Foods is midway through a project to end all sewage discharges into the Pagan River. At the prodding of state officials, the company will pipe its nearly 3 million gallons of sewage a day to a treatment plant in Suffolk.
The connection is expected to be complete by early 1997.
KEYWORDS: WATER POLLUTION by CNB