Thanksgiving is a time for giving thanks and spending time with friends and family.  Traditionally, it isn’t a time to think of regulations, unless maybe you’re talking about football. 

But, like everything, there are regulations in place that help make your Thanksgiving a safe and happy one. 

There are regulations regarding the growing and processing of many of the stars of the dinner table…turkey, cranberries and sweet potatoes to name a few. 

If you’re going to hunt your own turkey, there are plenty of regulations making sure you do it safely and within the proper borders. There are also such things as sweet potato weevil quarantines and cranberry commissions.  I didn’t see any specific regulations for the classic can-shaped cranberry loaf that is part of many family traditions (mine included), but I’m sure they’re out there somewhere.

Traditionally, people also take time on Thanksgiving to reflect on what they are thankful for.  There are, again, the usual – being thankful for good friends and family, good health, a job, food on the table. 

You may not be thinking about giving thanks from a regulatory angle, but there are plenty of reasons to be thankful for the fact that we live in a country where regulations on everything from air pollution to, well, turkey hunting, exist. 

They keep us safe, protected, breathing reasonably clean air, and with assurances that, with the careful regulation of turkey populations, there will be plenty of turkeys available for us to put on our Thanksgiving tables for years to come.

In wrapping up this turkey-themed post, I think it would be remiss if we didn’t look at phrases with the word “turkey” in them. 

Take, for example, the phrase “let’s talk turkey.”  It means to talk, in a plain and straight-forward manner, about a difficult or awkward subject. 

I’m sure many of these “turkey talks” have occurred over difficult subjects in the regulatory world. 

Regulations, and a business’ compliance or non-compliance with them, is never a light-hearted matter.  There are many occasions in business where it is important to talk turkey. 

There is also the phrase “cold turkey,” which means to stop something abruptly.  I’m sure there are times when a business must stop an activity cold turkey or face strong repercussions. 

What it makes me think of, with my Thanksgiving-minded brain, is left-over turkey and the wonderful sandwiches that can be made from it.  Mmmmm!  Please, enjoy your Thanksgiving and take a moment to be thankful for everything that you have!

Tierra Environmental & Industrial Services, Inc., proudly sports the slogan, "Tierra has the expertise to quickly and effectively resolve a sewer crisis and get you back in business." According to the US Department of Justice, Tierra management allegedly conspired to crimes that were tantamount to actually causing a sewer crisis.

On November 3, 2011, Ronald Holmes, Tierra's Owner, and Stewart Roth, a Project Manager at the company, were indicted in the US District court of Hammond, IN, with one count of conspiracy and six counts of violating the Clean Water Act.

Holmes and Roth were charged with illegally discharging wastewater into the sewers of the Hammond Sanitary District from a closed, unpermitted facility. According to the indictment, Tierra's primary facility in East Chicago, IN, held no permit to discharge industrial waste into the district's sewer system and the facility's connection to that sanitary sewer system had been sealed shut; therefore, the company had to transport wastewater to other facilities for final treatment and disposal.

The defendants allegedly conspired to cut the costs associated with paying other facilities to lawfully treat, store, or dispose of the wastewater Tierra collected from its customers. The pair allegedly ordered their dispatchers to direct wastewater transporters to a shuttered facility on 141st Street in Hammond, IN, a separate property owned by Ronald Holmes. At this facility, the wastewater was discharged directly into the Hammond Sanitary District's sewer system.

The Clean Water Act makes it a felony to knowingly discharge hauled pollutants into publically-owned treatment works (POTW) from a discharge point not designated by the POTW.

The 141st Street property is adjacent to a residential neighborhood and Hermit's Park, home to a number of youth baseball fields.

If convicted, Holmes and Roth each face up to 5 years in prison on the conspiracy count, and if convicted on all six Clean Water Act counts, they face 18 more years in prison and fines that could total $1.5 million. The company itself may also face fines and probation.

In 1988, Roth, as district manager of the Hammond Sanitary District, was indicted on federal charges for falsifying documents to conceal the illegal dumping of approximately 12 billion gallons of untreated, hazardous industrial waste into the Grand Calumet River. He pled guilty in 1990, was sentenced to three years probation, paid a fine of $5,000 and served 500 hours of community service.

The case was investigated by the Northern District of Indiana Environmental Crimes Task Force, including agents from the EPA's Criminal Investigation Division, the Criminal Investigations Office of the Indiana Department of Environmental Management, the Inspector General's Office of the US Department of Transportation, and the Criminal Investigative Arm of the US Coast Guard. The case is being prosecuted by the US Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Indiana and the Environmental Crimes Section of the Justice Department’s Division of Environment and Natural Resources.

By David Gottlieb

Citation Technologies is about to celebrate its 20th birthday, more or less.  Like my great-grandmother, no one remembers our exact date of birth (but we think we have the year right). 

Our founder is retired and might be in Costa Rica.  That leaves me, a 16-year employee, as the person with the most complete memories of how a modest startup grew up to be a modest success.

It all started in 1995,  when Citation Technologies was called Citation Publishing, and when its staff consisted of a president, an editor, three assistants, and a salesperson. 

Its product was a series of diskettes containing a few federal regulations concerning EH&S (environmental, health and safety) compliance, plus a smattering of recent Federal Register articles about the same subjects. These were updated monthly and sold to a couple hundred subscribers, mostly small and medium-sized companies who wanted their regulations in electronic format. 

The editor, who shall remain nameless (partly because I can’t remember his name), collected the articles from the Federal Government, put them into the desired electronic format, and organized them on diskette with a rudimentary menu and search system.  He did this every month until one day he decided that he was so important to the business that he should be a part owner. 

The existing owner disagreed.  The editor got angry.  He took the company’s only server, climbed to the roof of the building, and threw it off the edge.

It turned out to be a great break for the company (pun intended) because it resulted in my being hired as a consultant to write software to automate the process of creating the product. 

Our new system, together with the advent of CDs which allowed us to publish much larger amounts of data, resulted in a more extensive product, with large chunks of the Code of Federal Regulations and the Federal Register and even regulations from some of the more important states!  We were able to sell to more and larger companies, and even raise our prices.

Then we had a great idea.  Why not put our content on an Internet website and charge for accessing it? 

This was 1997.  Amazon was two years old.  The coming of age of electronic commerce, widely regarded as occurring around 1998 or 1999, had not yet happened.  Our website accounted for a whopping 2% of our sales.  Our competitors yawned and chose not to follow suit, maybe because our total market share was under 1%, and 2% of 1% is … well, it’s pretty small.

Those were the days!  I remember them well. 

State regulations were a special challenge because they were never available on the Internet.  Usually we had to scan hard copy of varying quality, and then do optical character recognition (OCR) to recover the text so that we could write HTML documents.  The OCR software of the time was none too good, so we drove our editorial assistants crazy correcting its output.

Of course, we used electronic sources whenever they were available.  The state of Washington produced a magnetic tape where every paragraph in their regulations was its own file.  The file titles were helpful though (1, 2, 3, 4, …).

We called a southern state once (again, no names) to see if maybe they had their regulations in WordPerfect format, or something else that we could read electronically.  The lady who we spoke to was amused. 

“Heavens, no”, she said, “Why, we just got electric typewriters last year.”

Even more amusing was our experience with another state in the same area.  We gleefully found a website one day – a website! – that had their regulations.  It looked official.  This was too good to be true! 

For months we took the material we needed from that website, until one day we noticed that it had not been updated for a while.  And some of the regulations looked a little strange.  So we called the state and were told that the website had been put up by a junior at one of the state colleges, and that he had graduated.  So much for that. 

A closer look revealed that he had also decided that he could write better laws than the state legislature.  Most of his changes were in the area of criminal penalties for drug use.  But he also inserted a clause in state forestry regulations prohibiting logging within a very large circle centered on the state capital, a region that I calculated included substantial portions of the Antarctic subcontinent.  (Sorry, I got carried away and made up the last sentence, but the rest is true)

Anyway, by 2000 the company had grown to the point where there was real professional management, a decent staff, and even machine-printed paychecks.  We were on our way.  But it has never been quite the same for me.

With oil growing more scarce each year, energy companies have been turning to alternative fuel sources, including shale and coalbed methane gas.

Like other energy sources, the problem facing the natural gas and oil industry is how to regulate the environmental impact that drilling causes.

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has recently announced a timeline for developing environmental standards that would help regulate the wastewater produced from natural gas extraction. Currently, no such set of standards are in place. The EPA will be accepting input from the energy industry and public health organizations, as well as other stakeholders.

While previously not economical, recently developed technologies have turned shale and coalbed gas drilling into a more lucrative business venture, resulting in an increase in drilling activities. The Obama administration has further encouraged drilling in the hopes of weaning Americans off of foreign oil while simultaneously creating a new source of employment.

Main environmental concerns over natural gas extraction are centered on wastewater discharges through the process of hydraulic fracking. Chemically-treated water is used in the gas well to help release the gas and pump it up to the surface. While the gas is then sent to a compressor for processing, the water used during extraction is often left in the ground, where it can contaminate freshwater aquifers. In other instances, this "produced water" is either released into streams, used in irrigation systems, or placed in evaporation ponds.

The produced water used in natural gas extraction contains dissolved compounds such as sodium bicarbonate and chloride, resulting in a higher level of salinity. In Australia, evaporation ponds have sometimes failed to properly reincorporate the water, leaving behind poor soil quality and subsequent lack of vegetative growth because of the sudden abundance of sodium.

Scientists are still debating the impact of natural gas wastewater however. Earlier this year, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released a study that showed lower levels of pollution when coupled with proper disposal techniques. Gas wells that resulted in groundwater contamination were not employing higher wastewater processing standards. The study showed that a detrimental environmental impact can be minimized with proper regulation such as those standards proposed by the EPA.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) are working together to examine the possibility of utilizing potentially contaminated sites, such as brownfields, Superfund sites and former landfills or mining sites as locations for renewable energy production. 

The study is part of EPA’s RE-Powering America’s Land Initiative, which was launched in 2008 to encourage the development of renewable energy on contaminated land. 

There are 26 sites in 20 states that are being evaluated for the potential use of wind, solar, biomass or geothermal energy production.  Each site will be evaluated to determine the best renewable energy type for the site, potential energy generating capacity, economic feasibility and return on investment. 

Successful examples of renewable energy projects being constructed on contaminated sites are already in existence.  Over 20 projects have been completed and more are underway.  In 2010, a six megawatt solar array was built on a superfund site in Sacramento County, CA.  The solar array is being used to power the cleanup of the site. 

One possible site under evaluation is the West Haymarket brownfield site in Lincoln, NE.  Funds from the feasibility study are being used to look at the possibility of using the site to generate renewable wind energy.  The energy could be used to power a planned 16,000 seat arena and other civic, commercial and retail projects.  Using wind energy would make the $340 million redevelopment project more sustainable and reduce its carbon footprint.

Another site undergoing evaluation is the Round Grove Creek Landfill, part of the Municipal Farm Site that is owned by the city of Kansas City, MO.  The site offers just over 14 acres of clear, level land, located close to a public utility substation and power lines, making it an ideal site for solar energy production.  Another area of the Municipal Farm Site, the Western Portion, contains 19 acres of brownfield sites and 120 acres of vacant, clear and level land located close to power lines and railroad lines, making the site ideal for biopower development. 

The overall goal of these studies is to provide information on the best way to renew and revitalize the potentially contaminated sites while protecting public health and the environment and providing economic benefits to the communities around them, including the creation of jobs.  Mathy Stanislaus, assistant administrator for EPA’s Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response says, “These studies are the first step to transforming these sites from eyesores today to community assets tomorrow.”