Editor’s note: This commentary is by Jessica Miller of Cabot.
[A]s the land application program of Cabot Creamery’s waste was becoming more and more problematic, the District 5 Environmental Commission issued Land Use Permit 5W0870 on Sept. 15, 1986, in which condition 11 required the permittee, Cabot Creamery, to build a waste treatment plant and it be fully operational by 1991.
Cabot Creamery then went to the town selectmen and urged them to apply for a $2 million Urban Development Action Grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which would help with the construction of the treatment plant. The recipient of the grant would be the Town of Cabot which would then loan the grant money to Cabot Creamery which would then pay the town back at the end of the life of the grant.
Final approval of the grant came on Sept. 23, 1986. On Oct. 29, 1986, condition 11 of the land use permit was revised to include use of land application until Nov. 1, 1990, and in September 1990, the Agency of Natural Resources issued Cabot Creamery an indirect discharge permit, #ID 9-0043, authorizing Cabot Creamery to land apply its waste.
The project elements listed in the original HUD grant rider to Section 1.03 (21) “Means construction of a cheese aging warehouse, cutting plant, and supporting on-site improvements, including waste disposal facilities and provision of specialized automated processing equipment.” The terms of the grant were as follows: “The Developer shall complete the Project Elements on the Project Site at a total cost of no less than $10,317,986 of which no less than $5,000,000 shall be private loan funds, not less than $3,317,986 shall be Developer’s equity funds, and not more than $2,000,000 shall be Grant Fund.”
Throughout the life of the grant there were five amendments. Among other requests in those amendments including changes to private fund-grant ratios, increases in construction costs and decreases in private funds, were those requests concerning the waste treatment facilities. In Amendment 1, the project elements remain the same. And there was no confusion among all the parties involved that waste disposal facilities referred to a waste treatment plant. Multiple Urban Development Action Grant monitoring reports from 1989 through 1991 revealed that “The completion of the on-site sewage treatment facility will not be completed on schedule as contemplated by the Grant Agreement”; “The project is essentially complete except for the construction of an on-site sewage treatment system”; “The only item remaining to be done is the construction of on-site sewage treatment facilities.” In response to these reports, Cabot Creamery requested, in Amendment 2, that waste disposal facilities be removed from the project elements of the grant.
On April 21, 1986, five months before the HUD grant was approved, Cabot Creamery sent a letter to the District 5 Environmental Commission saying, “The construction of a multi-million dollar sewage disposal plant was considered and rejected simply because to build such a facility would bankrupt the company. In addition, such a facility would be technologically obsolete by the time it was completed.”
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As a result of that amendment, expenditures incurred pertaining to the waste disposal project, totaling $610,252, were no longer allowable. In a June 19, 1991, letter to HUD from the town, as directed by Cabot Creamery, it says, “While the project no longer contemplates the construction of a wastewater treatment plant, it still includes direct disposal costs in the amount of $610,252 which were included in the original grant application.” Direct disposal costs were never part of the original grant. In Amendment 3, with waste disposal facilities now deleted from the grant’s project elements, Cabot Creamery expanded the definition of project elements to include chemical storage area, new separator, manufacturing equipment, silo, smokestack and whey trucks and field engineering.
Realizing the loss of grant money after deleting waste treatment facilities from the project elements in the grant, Cabot Creamery requested a fourth amendment to reinstate waste disposal facilities back into the original grant. But now, waste disposal facilities referred to on-site pretreatment and off-site disposal; “A concept,” stated by a HUD area audit supervisor, “set forth in the original grant.” Not only was the concept never in the original grant, but federal money, designated in the original grant for a waste treatment plant, was now being used to continue Cabot Creamery’s land application program – a program the HUD grant was intended to mitigate. Amendment 5, executed by HUD on Jan. 21, 1992, concerned the close-out agreement of the grant.
On April 21, 1986, five months before the HUD grant was approved, Cabot Creamery sent a letter to the District 5 Environmental Commission saying, “The construction of a multi-million dollar sewage disposal plant was considered and rejected simply because to build such a facility would bankrupt the company. In addition, such a facility would be technologically obsolete by the time it was completed.” A Nov. 2, 1989, letter from Cabot Creamery to the Cabot Selectmen includes: “It should be obvious from the financial statements that the company is not using federal funds as a substitute for equity. It should also be clear from the documents and the permit application that the company is not seeking to eliminate construction of a waste treatment facility from the project list.” In a Nov. 24, 1989, Cabot Creamery newsletter, it said, “Our plan was to build a 2 million dollar treatment plant that would meet the water quality standards then in force. We now believe that the cost to build a treatment plant that might meet the new water quality rules is between 4 and 5 million. We believed the expenditure of 2 million dollars would solve our waste disposal problem and our commitment at the time we started this process was to spend the money to solve the problem by building such a plant, but a plant constructed to meet the old regulatory standards would not meet the regulations now.”
The most common excuse over the years why Cabot Creamery never built a waste treatment plant was that in 1986 the Winooski River did not have the assimilative capacity to handle Cabot Creamery’s then waste load of 60,000 gallons per day. We also heard that it would bankrupt the company, that it couldn’t meet the water quality standards, that it would cost $4 million to $5 million to build, that a conventional waste treatment facility was neither economically nor technologically feasible and that, according to state EPA advisers, it was the least desirable environmental alternative. None of these excuses, however, explains why Cabot Creamery would apply for a federal grant in 1986 to build a treatment plant when the company had already been told that the Winooski River couldn’t handle its waste load. And why, with an HUD grant that included more than $10 million, couldn’t a state-of-the-art treatment plant, which would greatly reduce its waste load, be built? And if, in fact, Vermont’s water quality standards were raised three years after the grant approval, wouldn’t this be more of a reason to build a waste treatment plant? And were these new, strict water quality standards applied to the land application of waste into the groundwater, surface water, runoff and other water sources?
It should be clear that Cabot Creamery never intended to build a waste treatment plant and it was playing everybody in pretending that it did. It convinced the District 5 Environmental Commission that with the HUD grant it would build the plant. It convinced HUD that its permits were in order to satisfy the requirements of the grant. It convinced the town of Cabot that Cabot Creamery’s waste disposal trucks, like prehistoric, armor-plated monsters spewing waste on fields where farm animals graze and rolling in and out of the town all day, every day, would be a thing of the past. But,in the late 1980s, early ’90s, Cabot Creamery was deeply in debt and attempted to turn a farmer’s cooperative into a solely cheese-making operation. When the member farmers rejected that proposal, the sale of the creamery was the only option. And prior to Agri-Mark’s purchase of the creamery in 1992, it demanded, among other things, that the condition to build a waste treatment plant be removed from the Land Use Permit 5W0870. The condition was struck and the sale went through.
As long as it can dump its waste onto fields in 33 towns throughout Vermont and discharge its most aggressive chemicals, disguised as pasteurized polished permeate, into the municipal treatment plant and beyond into the Winooski River and Lake Champlain, Agri-Mark will never build an on-site treatment plant in Cabot. With its land application of chemically laden washwater continuing at a galloping clip, Agri-Mark should do the right thing and move its plant to a location that could accommodate what is essentially a business of waste management and build a technologically advanced treatment plant. To do so in Cabot, with its waste load of 185,000 gallons per day going into the Winooski River and beyond, would be like squeezing an elephant into a ballet slipper.