NORWALK, Conn. – One of the people behind a recent request for a public hearing has some advice for Norwalk officials who are complaining of an alleged $25,000 expense: Look in the mirror.
“Be more honest and more open, then you wouldn’t have a problem. If you’re honest and open and never hide anything then what are you worried about? Come right out and say it,” said Pete Johnson, one of 36 people who signed a petition that caused the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) to hold a public hearing before renewing the permit for Norwalk’s sewage treatment plant.
The hearing has brought condemnation upon Norwalk environmental activist Diane Lauricella, the target of an editorial and a letter to the editor written by Councilman David McCarthy (R-District E). Johnson and John Frank, another signer of the petition, say that is part of the pattern that led to the hearing in the first place.
The permit issued by DEEP two weeks ago is unaltered from the version drafted in August, before Lauricella submitted the petition in response to a legal notice in The Hour, before the public hearing.
“When this legal notice was in at the end of the summer for a variety of reason I was approached by East Norwalk people to be the front person for a petition. I won’t name them yet. … I did get 30 signatures, I explained it to everyone who signed,” she said.
Deb Goldstein also got signatures for the petition.
McCarthy’s November editorial speculated that the hearing would cost “perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars.” With the hulabaloo over with, Department of Public Works Director Hal Alvord has put a $25,000 price tag on the hearing, with a similar amount paid by the state.
He does not have any documents to back that up as yet.
Part of the figure is for an outside lawyer, services for which he said he did not have an invoice yet, he said.
Part of the figure is derived from “back of the envelop figuring,” calculating the staff time spent on the issue plus the cost of multiple trips to Hartford. He mentioned Wastewater Systems Manager Ralph Kolb and DPW Operations Manager Lisa Burns.
Last week he said he could not remember any overtime hours stemming from the issue – Kolb and Burns are on salary, not entitled to overtime. In the same conversation he answered a question about the snow budget, saying that overtime hours were the only real concern, as staff members hours are shifted to another category. “That’s straight time, labor, that’s just an allocation of total labor,” he said.
Couldn’t the same thing be said about the sewage treatment plant?
“The point is, what they would have been doing is things that would have been keeping normal operations going or looking at solving the problems. What did we do? We spent months and months and months and how many 10s of thousands of dollars to end up where we were going to be anyway,” he said.
Alvord and other officials have expressed exasperation, saying that the people behind the hearing did not come to the city with their concerns, instead starting a state process that included the hearing.
“I’ve been here 10 years. They have yet to come to a WPCA (Water Pollution Control Authority) meeting. So if nobody ever came and said hey, the levee’s going to blow apart around the thing. … The odor thing – we’ve been through this odor thing I don’t know how many times but nobody has ever come to the WPCA meetings. And then all of sudden, we’ve got signatures of people from Stamford and Silvermine and Wilton and everything else demanding a public hearing and we ended up right where we would have been eight months ago,” he said.
No one ever came to a Public Works Committee meeting to complain about the sewage treatment plant, he said.
Lauricella, Johnson and Frank said they went through city channels years ago to complain about smells, which Frank described as being, on occasion, “really gag-a-maggot bad” at the time.
“All we got was punishment,” Lauricella said.
Johnson and Frank say they went to at least one Public Works Committee meeting back then, when they were both on the Shellfish Commission. Frank, who now lives in Florida, was chairman. Johnson is chairman now. But they say they went to the meeting as residents, not commissioners.
“It was a waste of time because, number one, you’re not allowed to talk,” Johnson said.
Public speakers at city meetings are usually told they can’t speak about anything that is not on the agenda for a meeting.
“Pete Johnson and I went to a public works committee meeting years ago (5 ?) when we were trying to get somebody to do something about ODOR. I don’t recall what set him off, but (then-Mayor Richard) Moccia went nuts, screaming at us, me mostly, he claimed that he made me shellfish commission chairman (not true) and he could remove me just as quick as he chose. I was too startled to respond, with anything I wanted to see on the record, so I kept quiet. There was nothing in the minutes of that meeting when they were published,” Frank wrote in an email.
“He screamed at me,” Johnson said. “He was insinuating that I was representing the Shellfish Commission so I just said to him, ‘Well I live in East Norwalk and the smell stinks.’…There was nothing in the minutes. They wouldn’t write that in there.”
“Moccia’s administration had lots of people who really worked hard to discredit Dianne,” Frank wrote. “They started rumors (about her) … A lot of her activism was about environmental issues and the violators were Moccia supporters. She first came to public attention in Norwalk as a DEP (then-Department of Environmental Protection) employee and I have been with her at DEP and she is well known and has a lot of friends there who worked with her.”
“You couldn’t get anywhere in local channels. They were trying to blackball her anyways, to shut her up,” Johnson said.
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