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Chapter 83
The phone rang on Jack Musgrave's desk. He put his feet down, and leaned forward to pick it up. "Waste Water Treatment Plant," he answered.
"How's it going, Jack?" the voice in the phone said. Jack realized it was Don Kutzley he was talking to.
"Pretty good," he said. "Plant's running smooth, right now."
"You got a few minutes so we can go someplace and talk?"
"Sure, Gary's here, he can keep an eye on things," Jack said. "I'll be right up."
"Not here," Don said. "Let's go someplace. I'll come down and pick you up."
"Whatever you say, Chief," Jack said, wondering what was up. "I'll be here."
A few minutes later, Musgrave was standing outside when Kutzley drove up in his recycled police car. He got in the right side, and Don started out of town. "Who have you been talking to about the retention pond?" Kutzley asked.
"I haven't talked to anybody, except the engineers," Musgrave said.
"Well, I just got off the phone with Mike McMahon," Don said. "He said someone he knows saw you out with that crew that was taking soil borings out on 427, and he wondered what the hell was going on."
"I didn't tell anybody outside of the engineers," Jack reiterated.
"Mike smells something, I can tell you that," Don said.
"He's going to smell quite a bit," Jack said. "That area down the hill from his house is the best site they've found for the retention pond."
"I don't want to have him on my case," Don said. "Jesus, he got the manager of the road commission fired after that series of columns he wrote on how they're wasting money, and I know for a fact the real reason he was pissed off with the road commission is that
they
didn't grade the road past his house."
"Hey," Jack said. "You've got to figure that he's going to find out sooner or later."
"The later, the better," Don said. "The closer this thing is to a done deal, the less time he'll have to react. I don't want to have to go through with it at all, but if we don't get some sort of a ruling or waver or something from the EPA, say by the end of the year, we're
going to have to do something. Either go through with the separation project, or the retention pond, so we've got to have both the projects pretty well pulled together, pretty soon."
Jack realized that was where they were headed -- the possible site of the retention pond. "Have you got a report back from the engineers yet?" he asked.
"Yeah, it came in the mail this morning. Something like five and a half to six million."
"That's a million more than the separation," Jack observed.
"Yeah, every penny of it. Just from a cost viewpoint, I'd rather we went through with the separation, but I don't know if we're going to be allowed to, not while the EPA and the Fish and Wildlife Service are trading memos, but not making a decision. The thing is, we
can probably go ahead with the retention pond, but not without a lot of flak from McMahon."
"It'll be more than flak," Jack replied. "You must not have looked at the plat out there very well."
"What do you mean?"
"Of the site, about two thirds of it is owned by Binky Augsberg," Jack said. "Mike owns the other third."
"Jesus, you're just full of good news, today, aren't you? We could get it through eminent domain, I suppose."
"Not without a fight," Musgrave said. "I don't think Mike has a lot of money, but he's good friends with Colonel Matson, and he's not exactly your greatest fan. He could keep this tied up with lawyers for years, if he's of a mind to."
"Why the hell is it," Kutzly said, "There's only the one site within miles where we've got enough clay to be able to come up with a good seal for the retention pond, and it's the one site that will get both the local newspaper and the local moneybags pissed off at us?"
"It wouldn't be a heck of a lot more expensive to build it out back of the plywood plant," Jack said. "True, it's more work, but I think Clark would go along. He's kind of between a rock and a hard spot, as the Mayor."
"It's only about a million and a half more expensive," Don said. "Somehow, this lousy snake has turned a three million dollar project into a seven and a half million dollar project."
"It'd be cheaper to operate in the long run," Jack said. "It costs money to be able to pump that far, with the kind of volume we're talking about. There isn't exactly a lot of fall, and you'd have to pump it back from the 427 site, too."
"It'd take a long time to go through a million and a half dollars worth of electricity," Don said. "You got to figure that end of it, too."
"I guess it's going to be up to council," Jack said. "Have you talked to any of them, yet?"
"No," Don admitted as he drove by the corner to County Road 427; he didn't want anybody to notice them driving by to take a look at the site. "I told them that we're exploring some alternatives, but I haven't been any more specific than that. I know damn well that if
I tell them anything too specific yet, it'll be to McMahon before I could say `shit'".
"You're not planning on bringing it up tomorrow night?"
"Not hardly. McMahon will be there, and Heather Sanford will be there, too, and that would really let the cat out of the bag. I thought of pulling an executive session, under the real estate transfers clause, but that won't keep the secret. The heck of it is, there's a good
chance that the Fish and Wildlife Service is going to cave in to the EPA, at least that's what Blackbarn thinks. If that happens, we're going to have Heather Sanford and the Defenders of Gaea on us so quick it won't be funny."
"You know, maybe we're rushing into this," Jack said. "Maybe we ought to just set back and let the situation develop a little. After all, we've had a fairly dry year. We've only overflowed six days. If we have a dry year next year, we might get out of it with only having
to pay maybe sixty or eighty thousand dollars in fines. We can absorb that into operating costs for a year, if we had to."
"Yeah, and if we get a wet one, then we could be eating a quarter of a million bucks, too. I think the EPA will cut us some slack if they see that we're working on the problem, but they're not likely to if we're just sitting and waiting to see what's happening. They can
still say that we have to protect the snake, and still not allow overflows, and then we're in real problems." There was a corner coming up; Don used it to turn around to head back toward town.
"It's a mess, all right," Musgrave said.
"Yeah, a tough one," Kutzley said. "Don't me wrong. The retention pond is a good idea, and it may save our asses yet. I'm just not real anxious to pay the price I'm going to have to pay to go that route if we don't have to. Who knows? With a million and a half bucks
worth of taxpayers money riding on the deal, maybe McMahon won't feel like he has too much room to bitch. I mean, let him see what it's like to have the shoe on the other foot."
"You'd better plan on having a solid gold backup ready to roll if he decides he wants to fight," Jack suggested. "If he does decide to fight, then you're in trouble."
"The hell of it is, when you get right down to it," Kutzley said. "Is that this whole deal rides on that one snake, which may or may not be a Gibson's Water Snake, and if it is, there might not even be any more of them left."
"Yeah, one lousy snake," Jack agreed. "Think how much simpler things would have been if Mike's wife had just flushed the goddamn thing back down the toilet."
