In the wake of the criminal conviction of Tonawanda Coke and its top environmental official, New York State's top environmentalist was in town Thursday to tour of the area around the plant and around the Peace Bridge in Buffalo.
Department of Environmental Conservation commissioner Joe Martens toured with leaders of the Clean Air Coalition of Western New York and some of its members.
They were the prime figures behind pushing collection of data which showed the plant was breaking environmental laws, both in the air and on land, and not telling the truth about what was emitted into the air.
Recently a jury found Tonawanda Coke and Mark Kamholz guilty of breaking the law. The company faces $200-million in fines and he faces years in jail with a sentencing in July.
The DEC's Martens responded to a question about how the company could be trusted going forward.
"You can't believe them necessarily. That's why you put in place things like monitoring systems so you have an indicator of what the industry is doing," said Martens. "If we hadn't had those monitoring systems in place,we wouldn't have known how high benzene levels were in the community and we wouldn't have had a case against them. So, the state helped create that case by monitoring what they were doing."
Martens said his department hopes to keep the monitoring going but fiscal realities mean that may not last. He said Tonawanda Coke needs permits to continue operating and there will be conditions on a new permit.
Erin Heaney, executive director of the Clean Air Coalition said a lot of what happens in the future will be decided by Tonawanda Coke Owner J.D. Crane.
"We know that crane is really the guy who ran the plant for years. And, he's run the plant since '78 (is that right?)78-79 and we have certainly heard from many people that worked there he owned the company," said Heaney. "The buck stops with him. So, we'll see what happens. it will be interesting to see if anything happens between now and July."
Neighbors are excited because they say the investigation and the resulting criminal convictions show the power of people uniting for a cause.
