Above, Amy Tutwiler, attorney with Dane County Corporation Counsel
Last week Abigail Becker of the Cap Times reported on the June 3 special county board meeting about the PFAS mess at the Dane County Regional Airport and Truax base.
Becker reported that Amy Tutwiler, a former director at the Bell, Gierhart & Moore, S.C. corporate law firm, now representing Dane County Corporation Counsel, “told the County Board there’s many reasons to have confidence the situation is being handled effectively, professionally and transparently.”
“We’re not dealing with a situation that is out of control,” Tutwiler said. “But it does take time.”
In fact, the situation has been “out of control” for many decades
People living in the PFAS-soaked community downstream of the airport, and anyone who has read even a few of the PFAS stories in local papers in the last several years, know these statements are laughably false. Ms Tutwiler, a former corporate attorney hired by the county in 2019 to help with its growing PFAS problem, is clearly also acting as the county’s public relations agent. It’s unfortunate that Becker repeated Tutwiler’s statements without balancing them with more factual context.
Firstly, as reported by both the Wisconsin State Journal and the Cap Times, highly toxic PFAS and many other toxic chemicals have been oozing totally uncontrolled from Dane County Regional Airport and the Truax military base for decades. The worst contamination is at the Dane County-owned fire training areas, or “burn pits, used by the county, the City of Madison and the military since the 1950s, if not earlier. The head of the Dane County airport, city officials, and the military were well aware of this contamination by the late 1980s, but nobody ever cleaned it up. It’s still there.
Several years ago, the Madison Water Utility discovered that municipal Well #15, one mile southeast of the base and about 750 feet deep, is contaminated with significant levels of PFAS. This contamination took a long time to get that far and deep. The well also has a ratepayer-funded filter to remove perchloroethylene (PCE), which is also likely from Truax Field (though the Water Utility has never admitted that). People on the north and east sides of Madison drank this water for decades without knowing it, until it was shut down in 2019 due to citizen advocacy.
In early 2020, DNR released data showing that levels of PFAS in Starkweather Creek as it goes through the airport, and just downstream of it, are extraordinarily high. Not surprisingly, PFAS levels in Starkweather and Lake Monona fish were also high. In January 2021, the Wisconsin State Journal reported that PFAS has been found in all five Yahara Lakes. DNR’s Adrian Stocks told the State Journal: “We know of Starkweather (Creek) and the airport being the source,” Stocks said. “This sort of confirms that.”
PFAS and other poisons from Truax Field have been in Well 15 (and likely other wells), Starkweather Creek, lakes, and fish for decades. People who fish from Starkweather Creek and Lake Monona, many of whom are low income subsistence anglers, have consumed these poisons and fed them to their families all this time.
These poisons continue to flow daily, uncontrolled, from the airport and base. This is “under control?”
Meanwhile, the county has about $1 million of taxpayer money with which it plans to televise and then plug up storm drains and continue to tinker around with an experimental PFAS filtration technology that has failed so far. As for the burn pits, it will yet again hand them off to the military, which will “investigate” them for many years and then maybe—depending on the ever changing political winds affecting Department of Defense funding—propose some cleanup.
The community had no input on how to spend these public funds.
Effective, professional, transparent?
Again, Ms. Tutwiler also assured the county supervisors that “there’s many reasons to have confidence the situation is being handled effectively, professionally and transparently.”
Wow, really? This is public relations spin at its worst. Let’s start with the claim of “transparency.” Over two years ago, the city, county, and military began meeting behind closed doors to discuss what to do about their co-mingled PFAS mess. These secret meetings have gone on since then. Other than representatives from the mayor’s and county executive’s offices, no public or elected officials are included. There are no public minutes from these meetings, and communications among these parties have been deemed “confidential.” This was a purposeful choice by the county to keep the public and elected officials in the dark. Transparency? No.
Are these entities acting “professionally”? After receiving responsible party letters from the DNR, the city and county tried to claim they weren’t responsible even though it is irrefutable that they share significant responsibility. Now, they are again handing responsibility off to the military, under CERCLA (Superfund), knowing full well that this is no panacea and the military will likely take well over a decade (perhaps two) to remediate. (Also, based on past CERCLA-guided efforts at the Truax base, it is unlikely that any investigations and/or remediations they do will be thorough)
Even worse, it appears that Dane County has been violating DNR stormwater laws for 27 years. Professional, yep.
As for “effective,” the oozing, uncontrolled PFAS mess speaks for itself. Many decades after the PFAS and other contaminants began spewing from the airport and base, we don’t know how deep or wide the contaminant plume is, even though DNR law requires that responsible parties delineate it. No remediation has even begun.
Yet Ms. Tutwiler patronizingly assured county supervisors and the public that not only is the situation under control, based on her “previous experience” as an attorney, the delays in investigation and cleanup are “not surprising.” This is how the process typically works, she blandly oozed. Hmmm, interesting. In her work as a corporate attorney, helping her clients–corporate polluters, municipal wastewater dischargers, private waste companies, etc..–delaying toxic investigations and cleanups as long as possible was likely the norm. Does this make it OK for Dane County? No.
Was Ms. Tutwiler hired to help Dane County drag out (or avoid altogether) environmental investigations and cleanups required by local and state laws, and to keep decisions behind closed doors to escape scrutiny from the public and elected officials? Is she using the same strategies she used to help clients as a corporate attorney? It appears so.
County supervisors and engaged citizens should let County Executive Joe Parisi know that we deserve an accountable public servant, not a corporate flack, to facilitate how Dane County addresses the egregious toxic mess it helped create–and to openly and honestly engage the people who are being poisoned by it.
