I’ve just read your story about Atty. Pietro Lynn rounding up a posse to go after big, bad and vastly well funded Monsanto over PCB contamination. This will eventually end in a small settlement, which hopefully will cover the costs of what is essentially a vanity suit paid for by the taxpayers within the school districts that are suing when Bayer points out the discrepancy between the Vermont and national thresholds for assessing contamination risks.
As an aside, while I wouldn’t claim to know Pietro well, I know him well enough through my direct dealings with him during my time as Windham Northeast Supervisory Union chair (which came to an abrupt end on Sept. 8, 2021) to know he knows an opportunity when he sees one.
The story is elsewhere. The story is really about the state Agency of Education’s continual foot-dragging on this.
Finally, finally, after well more than a year of pressing my school board — for which they’ve been assiduously ignoring me back — we’ve finally gotten our PCB testing done on AOE’s schedule but we are told it will be “many months” before we have a result. This is partially because of the realization in Montpelier of two things:
1. The much stricter Vermont PCB thresholds
2. The paltry amount of money available in the remediation fund to meet those thresholds
BTW: My service on Bellows Falls Union High School board goes back to 1994, which is enough time to understand how both AOE (and the Department of Education before it) and the citizens who get on these boards to check “been there, done that” off their social resumes, do their best to ignore problems just like the Legislature does, by kicking them down the road for their successors to resolve.
No, I believe the vanity suits like this one are simply so much smoke to cover willful bureaucratic inaction.
David Clark
Westminster
