Evidently, Enbridge thinks the EPA is stupid– or doesn’t have access to the local news.
As MLive reported last week— along with numerous other news outlets— Enbridge has asked the EPA for an extension to complete the latest round of dredging ordered by the agency earlier this year. The reason for the extension request has to do (ostensibly) with the situation in Comstock Township, the Bell’s Brewery lawsuit, and permitting from the Michigan DEQ. In and of itself, the extension request isn’t terribly surprising. And since we don’t know very much about dredge pads and zoning in Comstock Township and haven’t carefully investigated those things, we’re not really in a position to offer any confident opinions about Enbridge’s plan–although if Comstock residents and business owners like Larry Bell have serious concerns, we certainly think they need to be heard.
So this post isn’t really about the site plan. Instead, it’s about the part of the story that no one else (as far as we know) has bothered to mention: the audacity– or, to call it what it is– the flagrant dishonesty of Enbridge’s letter to the EPA. Why the letter’s demonstrable falsehoods– and we don’t use this language lightly– have thus far been given a free pass we do not understand.
Before we explain, let’s put this in a little context. Over the past year, we have said– and shown— repeatedly that Enbridge fails to live up to its professed corporate values. This simple point was even the basis of our talk at the PSTrust conference last year, which a number of Enbridge representatives attended. So they know very well that plenty of us are measuring their actions against their words. Once again, let’s take a quick look at some of those values. The first ones on the list fall under the heading of “Integrity”:
Integrity
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Maintain truth in all interactions
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Do the right thing; do not take the easy way out
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Take accountability for our actions, without passing blame to others
With these things in mind, let’s watch as Senior Vice President of Operations Richard L. Adams violates all three of them in the span of just a few sentences. Here’s what Adams says in his letter to the EPA requesting that extension. The offending portions are in boldface:
Enbridge’s preparation for dredging in the Delta and Morrow Lake area has been discontinued due to an unanticipated issue with securing a dredge pad site. Enbridge originally selected a site for the dredge pad that met all technical and practical requirements and promptly applied for the appropriate permit from the Township of Comstock. Unfortunately, some local residents and business owners have vigorously opposed granting the permit. As a result, the Township of Comstock has not yet issued the required permit to allow use of the specific site selected for the dredge pad.
1. “Maintain truth in all interactions.” Is Adams’s description of why Enbridge’s dredging plan has been delayed truthful? Well, no. Adams makes it sounds as if Enbridge was doing everything precisely as it should and would have made the EPA deadline just fine until some pesky obstructionist locals got in the way and mucked everything up. But that little narrative, flattering though it may be to Enbridge simply does not square with reality.
For one thing, it is quite plainly NOT true to say that Enbridge “promptly applied for the appropriate permit from the Township of Comstock.” Of course, the term “promptly” might seem to leave a little wriggle room (after all, who gets to decide what counts as prompt?). But let’s consider the facts: the EPA issued its dredging order on March 14 of this year. Enbridge only submitted a site plan to Comstock Township on July 9, nearly four months later (and even then, they submitted it to the wrong body, further delaying matters; more on this below). And they only did so after the Comstock Township Supervisor discovered they were about to begin work without the permit and asked them to stop. Would any reasonable person honestly believe that that qualifies as having “promptly applied”? In fact, does that even count as having applied at all? We tend to think not, but can’t say for sure.
But you don’t have to take our word for it. Just consider some of the key players in this matter who also do not think it was prompt. One of them is Enbridge’s own attorney Christopher Tracy. Here is what Tracy said at the Comstock Township Planning Commission on July 25 about that site plan:
I’d like also to apologize on behalf of Enbridge in terms of sort of the fast pace of this. All of you know we’re under an order from the EPA, where work needs to transpire between now and the end of the year.
We would love to have a situation where we weren’t sort of under that kind of clock. So we apologize if we sort of put you in that position and we apologize for not submitting the site plan to you earlier. It should have been done in a different manner, but it was not.
“We apologize for not submitting the site plan to you earlier.” Extraordinary, isn’t it? Not even Enbridge’s own lawyer thinks they applied for the Comstock permit “promptly.” He even apologizes for not having applied for it promptly and says that “it should have been done in a different manner.”
And Tracy is not the only one who doesn’t think Enbridge applied for the Comstock permit promptly. Have a look at what Comstock Township Supervisor Ann Nieuwenhuis says in a July 10 letter to the Michigan DEQ:
At the outset I must express disappointment that substantial work on both of those sites has occurred without Enbridge applying for and obtaining the necessary Township permits required under the Township’s ordinances and its Zoning Ordinance in particular. While representatives of Enbridge have recently expressed to the Township an intent to apply for and obtain the necessary Township zoning approval and otherwise comply with all applicable Township ordinance requirements, this has not yet occurred. Enbridge’s delay in approaching the Township in this regard has unnecessarily exacerbated the Township’s citizens’ concerns and will make it much more difficult to give those concerns as reflected in the Township Zoning Ordinance proper consideration within the abbreviated timeframe that Enbridge indicates is available to it.
So, neither Enbridge’s own attorney nor the Comstock Supervisor think that Enbridge applied for the Township permit “promptly.” In fact, both of them state quite clearly that a major problem here is that Enbridge FAILED to apply for the permit promptly. That failure is the primary cause of the delay, a delay that has in turn caused Enbridge to seek that extension from the EPA. Yet, in the face of this clear fact, as agreed to by both an Enbridge attorney speaking before the Comstock Planning Commission and the Comstock Township Supervisor, Richard Adams tells the EPA that Enbridge applied for the permit promptly.
2. “Do the right thing; do not take the easy way out.” Which leads us to the next “value” that Adams violates in his letter. The whole point of all of this for Ann Nieuwenhuis (or so it seems to us) is that Enbridge did NOT do the right thing from the start, which would have been to initiate discussions with the Township from the very beginning, to communicate their dredging plans with them, and to apply for the appropriate permits before starting work. But they did none of that. That’s what Nieuwenhuis objected to in the first place. Instead, Enbridge tried to “take the easy way out,” tried to just do things the way they wanted to, without consulting local authorities or inviting local input. (This is the same sort of thing they did with Brandon Township and Howell Township earlier this year.) And since then, Enbridge has continued to NOT do the right thing, like, for instance, submitting the site plan to the Planning Commission and not the Zoning Board as the process requires (thus further delaying matters!). Why did Enbridge do that? Well, here is what Supervisor Niewenhuis had to say about that:
The township had previously warned Enbridge when submitting its site applications that it should go through the ZBA first, but Nieuwenhuis said Enbridge tried to expedite the process by going straight to the Planning Commission with its north site application.
“They didn’t want to do that because (notice of the ZBA meeting) has to be posted in a newspaper 15 days in advance of the meeting,” Nieuwenhuis said. “They thought going directly to the planning commission would be the way to go.”
That’s right, Enbridge tried to “expedite the process”; they tried to take the easy way out. The same goes for Adams’s letter. In it, he isn’t doing the right thing. The “right” thing would be to own up to having screwed up and to accept the consequences of that screw up. But that’s not what he is doing in the letter. Instead, he is taking the easy way out.
3. “Take accountability for our actions, without passing blame to others.” Or, to put that last point another way, Adams is most certainly not taking accountability for Enbridge’s actions. Quite the contrary, he is clearly passing blame to others. His letter makes it look like Comstock, the DEQ, and Larry Bell (they can’t even bother to get the name of the brewery right, calling it “Bell Brewery”) are to blame for the delays. It’s everybody’s fault but Enbridge’s. Locals have “vigorously opposed granting the permit,” Adams says. And “as a result,” Enbridge’s plans have been delayed. But that is at best a half-truth. It certainly does not in any way acknowledge Enbridge’s role in delaying the granting of that permit. Such a brazen, deliberate mischaracterization of this situation– aside from egregiously flouting the values Adams is supposed to live by as an Enbridge employee (and not just any employee, but an executive!)– are precisely why Enbridge has lost so much trust with so many people. If they’re willing to look EPA in the eye and pass off clearly demonstrable falsehoods, how is anybody else ever to believe anything they say?
The thing that baffles us most is why Enbridge thinks it can get away with this sort of thing, why they think it’s okay to carefully and deliberately and demonstrably misrepresent the situation to the EPA. Do they think that they can just pull the wool over the eyes of Jeff Kimble, the EPA on-scene coordinator to whom the letter is written? Do they think that Kimble is that stupid? that gullible?
For our part, we think no such thing. We think there’s no possible way that Kimble doesn’t know the truth of the matter. If he really is on scene, he most certainly knows that Enbridge wasn’t just unexpectedly blindsided by a bunch of oppositional Comstock residents one day. He must know that Enbridge created this situation by attempting to proceed without engaging those same Comstock residents or following Comstock’s ordinances. He surely knows all of that. If we were Kimble, we’d be furious, insulted, affronted. And yet we doubt (though we don’t really know) that Kimble and the EPA will call Enbridge out on all of this any more than the press will. Enbridge will most likely get its extension and incur no penalties. Richard Adams’s counterfactual letter will accomplish precisely what it was designed to accomplish regardless of whether it accurately represents the situation.
Which leads us to a pretty frightening, disheartening, demoralizing conclusion– but also an explanation of why Enbridge thinks it can get away with this sort of thing. It’s because they can and do get away with this sort of thing. Over and over. And that’s because everybody just plays along, lets it slide, looks the other way, treats it as no big deal, as just the way things are. So what we have is a situation that looks something like this: Enbridge does not tell the truth to the EPA and knows it’s not telling the truth; the EPA, Comstock Township, and the press all also know that Enbridge isn’t telling the truth; and Enbridge knows that the EPA, Comstock, and the press all know that Enbridge isn’t telling the truth. But nobody says a word about it. Instead, everybody silently agrees to pretend like Enbridge is telling the truth. Everybody agrees to live in a sort of imaginary world where the untrue gets treated as true, rather than a world in which what is true really does matter. It’s the same way that everybody agrees to pretend that Talmadge Creek and the Kalamazoo River are still real creeks and rivers, rather than Enbridge-created ones.
It’s just easier that way.
Beautiful writing. Have you ever thought of running for office?
Thanks, PM! And…. NO!!
I am so furious that the DEQ is doing everything the energy companies want and not representing the interests of the people of MI. Serving the state’s resources up to them on a platter.
“It’s the same way that everybody agrees to pretend that Talmadge Creek and the Kalamazoo River are still real creeks and rivers, rather than Enbridge-created ones.” The truth hurts. A lot.
The EPA is not worth the weight they carry. Often they make rules based on what they think is best and never look down the road at the greater environmental impact they cause. Emission regulations and DPF are causing issues that they did not see as the folk that have this equipment are now washing the concentrated soot right down the drain instead of the normal dilution process that happens. The EPA needs to wake up.