City Incurs MDE Fines for Consent Order Violations

By Terry E. Cohen, Council Member

Just received by the city council on July 8, 2008, is a memo from the Office of the Mayor concerning a $10,200 in fines by the MDE for violations of the consent order discharge limits. This relates to a period from June 2006 through April 10, 2008. The bulk of the violations (11) and fines ($6,500) relate to the period November 2007through February 2008.

The memo covers a June 13, 2008 correspondence from Department of Public Works Director Jim Caldwell, with which he attached the communications from the MDE received June 4, 2008.

These fines are not related to the two spills in June of this year.

I won’t speculate as to why this information took about a month to make its way to council. Given the great concern expressed by many about the WWTP and the possibility of fines, I wanted to share this information with our citizens as soon as possible.

City Administrator John Pick was kind enough to send me my requested information for any communications from the City to the MDE about the June 2008 spills. I will post that information later today. To the best of my knowledge, we are still awaiting communications back from the MDE.

Click here to see the documents concerning the fine referenced above.