Spill the beans

Some may have missed the Daily Gazette’s back-page brief regarding a $10,000 allocation the Saratoga Springs City Council made Tuesday. Some may think the 55-gallon hydraulic oil spill at the city Department of Public Works garage at Van Rensselaer and Division Streets was ancient history.

Well, apparently the state Department of Environmental Conservation doesn’t. City officials hired another law firm to contend with the agency more than 18 months after they first arrived on the scene of the lift leak at the garage. The 29-year-old lift apparently failed, causing roughly a drum of the noxious fluid to seep into the soil beneath the garage. DEC officials received a call about the spill just 10 minutes after it occurred on the morning before Valentine’s Day in 2007, just moments before nearly two feet of snow would blanket the city.

The initial response wasn’t reported to the press until more than a week later, when a Saratogian reporter discovered the debacle during council discussions of an emergency contract to clean up the mess. But as quick as the spill was discovered, cleaned and then publicized, it seemingly disappeared. That was until former Public Works fixture Tom McTygue came back with a bill for roughly $200,000 to do the work. Then-Mayor and McTygue nemesis Valerie Keehn suggested the hydraulic leak was part of a pattern with the DPW. And for once, she was partially right.

In 2007, there were five spill responses at the Van Rensselaer Street garage that were registered with the DEC. The number of spills reported in on year dwarfed those lodged during the previous decade. In fact, there were no spills reported at the garage during the decade before the DEC investigation kicked off. The last of the five reported in 2007 occurred in late October, just two weeks before the election that saw both McTygue and Keehn ushered out of city politics. Odd isn’t it?

Update: Mayor Scott Johnson weighed in on the whole debacle this week, just before DEC officials apparently pushed for a rescheduling of their Monday morning meeting. Johnson said the DEC was indeed going to spill the proverbial beans, at last tipping its hand to the city. He also said the whole damn flap was a situation of “politics at its worst” in the city, adding fuel to McTygue’s initial assertions.

Now there are plenty of boring theories why this could occur, namely that the DEC database is woefully inadequate in details; almost to the point where listing spills online is more or less senseless. But there are two other prevailing theories that are supported by the fact that the supposed nature watch dogs are still hammering away at their investigation long after the environmental impacts of these spills have become insignificant footnotes in the annals of newspaper clips.

First, there’s the theory that will undoubtedly make the McTygue critics chortle with delight. Considering the DEC was at the scene of the first hydraulic spill, they obviously observed some of the remediation. Perhaps they were tipped off to the spill by a whistle-blower, who knew these sorts of ‘accidents’ routinely went unreported and ignored. When workers started remediating the so-called 55 gallon spill, the watchful eyes of a DEC inspector may have notice soil being removed with a supersaturated content of the hazardous fluid.

Or worse yet, the state agents may have realized the DPW workers were simply ordered to take any tainted soil to a burgeoning construction debris landfill allegedly created by illegal dumpers. There are some conspiracy theory wingnuts who have persistently propagated this thought as part of an orchestrated effort to take McTygue down politically.

Then there’s the other theory. There is no denying Keehn’s connection with the DEC. Though her husband repeatedly claimed he had nothing to do with the DPW investigation, it’s not too difficult to imagine him cashing in a favor or two at the office, or a brief verbal discussion with the agency’s spill responders. And it’s clear that Keehn had a mole or three in the department, who probably had DEC’s spill response on speed-dial.

Once the ball is rolling on an investigation, state officials are hesitant to simply give up on the case. This is especially when one of their attorneys is quite clearly still politicking in Saratoga Springs. So it’s conceivable that David Keehn, a card-carrying member of the Democrats For Change splinter, is still fanning the flames of a dead investigation in order to besmirch the so-called McTygue faction in the run up to September’s primary. After all, all three McTygue brothers are running for spots on the city’s shattered Democratic Committee. They’re being challenged by Pubic Safety Czar Ron Kim’s wife and a pair of dubiously delusional Keehniacs named Thilo Ullmann and Hilary McLellan.

Either way, the DEC needs to drop the proverbial deuce or get off the pot. They need to explain why Saratoga Springs residents are paying two-fold for both sides of an investigation that was apparently launched to protect them from environmental hazards. And they need to do it soon, before they are again used as a political football. With the two-year anniversary of the spill just six months away, their probe into the DPW garage incident has become emblematic of the inefficiency that plagues our state government.