Taxpayers to get bill for cleanup

A longtime Hernando politician says he's not paying for the petroleum contamination at his defunct business.

By DAN DeWITT

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 26, 2000

BROOKSVILLE -- The signs of neglect are obvious enough at Chuck Smith's old petroleum wholesale outlet, S&B Go Inc., on Smith Street in southern Brooksville.

A forest has grown up around the silver-colored tanks at the back of the property. The green paint that trims the cluster of brick buildings is peeling badly. A dense, knee-high lawn is emerging in the asphalt parking lot.

That is nothing compared with what is beneath the surface of the facility, which has been defunct for seven years.

"A layer of waste petroleum 3/4-inch thick was present in a monitoring well" under the tanks, said a lawsuit filed in 1995 by the state Department of Environmental Protection against several former owners of the site, including Smith.

The contamination was a result, probably, of years of sloppy handling of petroleum products at the facility, which opened in 1926. The practices continued through the years of Smith's ownership, from the mid 1980s until 1991, the lawsuit said.

Smith, a longtime Hernando County commissioner and state representative, ignored the state's request to seal the area around the above-ground tanks with impervious concrete and to fix leaking valves in above-ground pipes.

Since then, he has consistently refused to pay for any cleanup of the site.

In April, the state decided it will pick up most of the cost, when it included the property in its Petroleum Cleanup Participation Program. The rules of the program call for the state to pay for 75 percent of the cleanup of such sites -- the average cost of which is $250,000 -- with the owners contributing the remainder. Smith, who filed for bankruptcy about the time the lawsuit was filed, said he doesn't even intend to pay that much.

"I'm not saying I'm indigent. I'm perfectly capable of taking care of myself. I'm saying I don't have money to pay for this cleanup," Smith said.

"What they're doing, in layman's terms, is finding someone with the wherewithal to pay for this, and they're in the wrong pew with me."

As it stands now, taxpayers will end up paying for a mess made by people named in the lawsuit, said Kenny Hayman, the state Department of Environmental Protection lawyer who is handling the case.

"It would have been nice if they had done something on their own."

One of Smith's contentions is that his site is not at all unusual; gas stations and all petroleum businesses historically gave little thought to pollution.

Florida, in fact, has about 13,000 sites with some level of petroleum contamination, said Michael Bland, who oversees the cleanup program. Between 3,000 and 4,000 of those, judged to pose the most serious threat to drinking water, are part of his program, which received $150-million in the most recent state budget.

Smith's site might not be one of the most dangerous.

Though it is only about a half-mile from one of the city's main water pumping facilities, on Lamar Avenue, the wells there are 600 feet deep and protected by non-porous clay soil, said Brooksville Utilities Superintendent Will Smith.

Because of the facility's proximity to Chuck Smith's former petroleum outlet and other contaminated sites, he said, "I have been monitoring that (Lamar Avenue) facility for petrochemical intrusions every month for a decade." And so far, he said, he has found none.

For a while, though, the old S&B Go facility certainly had some of the most famous old gas tanks in the state.

In 1991, when the Legislature was changing the rules for an earlier petroleum cleanup program, Smith was a member of the House Natural Resources Committee. He added language that would forgive so-called major violations, which Smith's were judged to be, and voted for the changes on the committee level, though he recused himself when the matter came to the floor.

By then, his actions had made headlines in newspapers across the state, and a St. Petersburg Times editorial had derisively labeled the bill, which eventually passed, the Chuck Smith Relief Act.

Smith said that he sold S&B Go for almost nothing shortly after that session and that his bankruptcy was mostly due to the losses suffered while he owned the business.

"If it was the Chuck Smith Relief Act, it failed miserably," he said.

The state has been trying to collect money for cleanup of the site almost ever since. Draper Underwood of High Springs, who bought the site from Smith, signed a consent agreement with the state in which he agreed to pay for the work.

Instead, said Hayman, "he kind of threw up his hands and walked away from it."

John Scussel of Altamonte Springs "basically agreed to pick up ownership of the business and property when everything fell apart at the end," Hayman said.

Hayman said the suit has been delayed for so long because Underwood, Smith and the other plaintiffs have dragged their heels.

"They have not been as cooperative as we would have liked," he said.

Smith said he didn't even know he had been sued.

"They would once a year send me a whole raft of questions and ask me to send my financial statements, and then they would do the whole thing again the next year," Smith said.

"It was always expressed to me that the depositions did not mean necessarily mean there would be a lawsuit."

Hayman said there most definitely has been a lawsuit pending against Smith. And the requests for financial statements will probably continue. If Smith claims he cannot pay his share of the cleanup costs, he must allow accountants contracted by the state to pore over his records.

And, considering the reluctance of Smith and the other owners to pay cleanup costs or improve the conditions at the S&B Go site, the state will almost certainly be seeking punitive fines, Hayman said.

"From my standpoint, it's pretty clear that there were regulations that needed to be adhered to that weren't, and the taxpayers of the state of Florida are going to be picking up the bill for this cleanup."

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