At last night’s meeting of the Ghent Planning Board, it emerged that TCI of NY is behind in payments to the Town of Ghent to cover engineering expenses related to cleanup of its Falls Industrial Road site, according to firsthand reports from attendees.
And until such payments are brought up to date, and until the company also puts $10,000 more in escrow for review, the Ghent planners do not intend to take up an application from the company to rebuild and resume operations.
TCI’s Brian Hemlock arrived with his attorney, Bill Better, as well as an engineer from Crawford & Associates and a representative of architect Dennis Wedlick, in an attempt to present an application—but ran into the stumbling block of past due bills and future escrow requirements. The application materials were dropped off, but not considered.
GhentCANN’s Patti Matheney reports: “It seems they have used up all of the escrow for the Town engineer to oversee the clean-up of the site and there are outstanding bills. The Board and [attorney] Ted Guterman were adamant they will not look at the new plans or ask the town engineer to review them until they put 10K into a new escrow account.”
Matheney also noted that a TCI representative “specifically stated that only non-regulated PCB's were dismantled at the plant and they do not handle any regulated PCB equipment. He made no mention of the DEC permit request from June of this year.”
However, that 2012 application indicated TCI’s plans “to store and consolidate regulated PCB wastes,” preparing them “for shipment to EPA approved and alternate disposition facilities,” an apparent contradiction.
Hemlock also circulated a heavily-massaged p.r. statement [ page 1 | page 2 ]. TCI worked with a public relations firm, Blass Communications, in the wake of August’s catastrophic inferno—its second fire of 2012—but it isn’t clear if they are still in the picture.
Lastly, Matheney writes that Planning Board chairman “Jonathan Walters asked the Board to "do their homework" over the next month and come back to the Jan. meeting with questions for TCI.
Audio of the meeting recorded by another resident is expected to be posted online later today.
