EnviroReporter.com – September 15, 2009
Recently replaced Department of Toxic Substances Control project manager for the multi-million dollar cleanups of the Boeing’s Santa Susana Field Laboratory and KB Home’s Runkle Canyon property, Norman E. Riley, sent a scathing letter to EnviroReporter.com Sunday afternoon disparaging his former employer and claiming that he has more incriminating revelations yet to come.
Riley’s wrath was in response to an e-mail of mine surreptitiously sent to him by Rocketdyne activist Christina Walsh, who helps run the Aerospace Cancer Museum of Education in Chatsworth-Lake Manor. Riley removed her response to the e-mail (which she declared “off the record”) and forwarded my original message with his comments to nine other individuals including Walsh and her museum partner, Bill Bowling, three KB Home officials, and Simi Valley City Manager Mike Sedell.
Riley also copied Preston Brooks, a partner with the law firm of Cox, Castle & Nicholson in Los Angeles, one of the largest real estate developer law firms in the country. The company’s website states that “Mr. Brooks counsels property owners, developers, lenders, municipalities, and pension funds on environmental risk management strategies in the context of real estate acquisition, financing and development.” The online bio also states, “In addition, Mr. Brooks represents clients engaged in the redevelopment of brownfields. He has represented purchasers of contaminated properties in negotiations with governmental agencies to minimize environmental liabilities, using procedures available under the California Land Reuse and Revitalization Act, the Polanco Act, and the Brownfields Revitalization and Environmental Restoration Act. Mr. Brooks also frequently assists clients to obtain and tailor environmental insurance policies to address environmental issues associated with real property.”
Riley’s motivation for copying a real-estate environmental attorney is unclear and it is not currently known whether Brooks represents Riley, KB Home, both entities or neither of them.
Riley also copied the missive to the Secretary of Cal-EPA, Linda Adams, and the acting director of DTSC, Maziar Movassaghi, who announced Riley’s departure as we reported in “Coup de Goo” August 19.
Riley began his unsolicited message with the audacity to refer to my private e-mail to Ms. Walsh as “misleading and self-serving.” He went on to explain his statements in a recent Miller-McCune article with a bizarre analogy about the difference between “having ass” and being an “ass.”
Riley then reveals that his authority in Runkle Canyon and at SSFL was terminated over five months ago:
[W]ith regard to the decision making at SSFL and the surrounding sites, Mr. Movassaghi withdrew my decision making authority in a memo dated April 8, 2009 and reserved all such decision-making authority for himself. When asked by members of the public about the status of the Runkle Canyon decision afterward, I consistently said that no decision had been made. That much was true: it was not a lie.
It’s not difficult to understand how one could be confused about Riley’s authority. In a July 13 interview with Joan Trossman Bien that we reported in “Not the Norm,” Bien asked the then official SSFL and Runkle Canyon cleanup chief who made the final cleanup decision. “DTSC,” Riley answered. “That is my department.”
According to Riley, it was getting more difficult for him not to tell the truth:
I will readily admit that it was becoming harder and harder for me to give the same response time after time without revealing the true nature of the delay. When I said that we are reviewing all of the comments and being thorough in our consideration of those comments, that was true too, but the fact of the matter is that we had completed that work long ago.
Riley, who had been with DTSC for 25 years until retiring September 3 (after being removed from his post), according to Ms. Walsh, then delivered this stunning tirade:
Unfortunately, that is the nature of being a subordinate who serves at the pleasure of appointing powers in an organization where obfuscation, abdication of authority, collusion, and other contemptible behaviors currently trump honesty and integrity which the public rightly expects and deserves.
EnviroReporter.com notes that it is ironic for a man who espouses such moral standards to take a private e-mail that he knows was not meant for him, edit it, and respond to it in a hostile manner while copying government officials, a controversial developer and an unidentified real estate attorney.
But Riley’s seeming contempt for this reporter and the public concerns about Runkle Canyon do not end there:
Let me now explain to you why no decision has been made regarding Runkle Canyon. First you should know that DTSC completed its responses to public comments (along with additional white material and surface water sampling several months ago: the results were negative).
Actually, DTSC, under Riley’s leadership before he was sacked, had instructed KB Home to come up with a Draft Response Plan for assessing and cleaning up Runkle Canyon. That is the plan the public commented on as we reported in our seven-part series “Railroading Runkle Canyon?”
Riley never responded to public comments, which total in excess of 100 pages amongst at least five different parties. Yet even if he had, it wouldn’t have made a difference as he makes abundantly clear:
After the April 8 memo, I stated in weekly reports submitted to Mr. Movassaghi every Friday that a decision was needed on Runkle Canyon and recommended that DTSC should APPROVE the response plan, thus allowing Runkle Canyon LLC to proceed with removal of the tar material and the collection of additional samples.
Instead of addressing the scientifically and legally astute comments, Riley simply ignored them and would have violated DTSC procedure, as governed by State law, if he had approved the Response Plan without formally responding to comments. But he was apparently canned before he could do so, much to the relief of area residents like the Radiation Rangers’ Reverend John Southwick who expressed satisfaction at Riley’s removal as reported in “Coup de Goo.”
Riley went on to blame delays in Runkle Canyon on who he called my “mentor,” presumably meaning Dan Hirsch, president of the nuclear watchdog group Committee to Bridge the Gap:
The reason the plan was not approved is simply because one person who you and a diminishing number of others imitate in comments, disapproved of the involvement of Dade Moeller, one of the most highly respected firms in the business. DTSC found no reason to disqualify Dade Moeller whose only involvement in this project was to review and interpret the data, not to collect or manage the samples, but I was nevertheless, to my considerable worry and dismay instructed to contact the developer and suggest that they hire a different consultant due to “political” realities. Runkle Canyon LLC rightly refused this extortion. According to Mr. Movassaghi who was informed of that response, it was then later suggested by your mentor that the data collection called for in the response plan could proceed if Mr. Dempsey were available to witness the sampling activities. Oblvious [sic] to this insult against DTSC’s highly qualified field personnel, Mr. Movassaghi subsequently contacted USEPA about that possibility. I do not know what answer he was given (I was by that time excluded from nearly all meetings and communications concerning the SSFL and neighboring properties), but I suspect it was no different than the one I was given when I asked USEPA for technical assistance on radiological issues at the SSFL and surrounding site many months prior.
Riley’s suggestion that Hirsch is my “mentor” is absurd, as is the notion that anyone imitates him. Hirsch is singularly inimitable, and while he and I have not always seen eye to eye, the fact is that there would be no clean-up agreement without his 30 years of dedicated and conscientious work (let alone any museums.)
Yeah right Tammi H. What an upstanding guy. First he sides with Boeing against SB 990 and now he appears to be working for KB Home. Guess he figured out where the money is public health be damned. With “regulators” like that who needs polluters?
I am SICK and saddened that I recently moved to Simi Valley and live here with our 6 month old son. My husband owned the house and I would NEVER have moved here otherswise. I assure you, with or without the sale of our home, we will be LEAVING soon. These issues are serious and I’m disgusted about everything I’ve read about the lies and witholding of truth so that people in these communities could be SAFE. I can’t even read all of the post above – it’s immature and digusting! This is HELL on earth – DO NOT MOVE TO SIMI VALLEY! Do your own research as I have and you will see Santa Susana has contaminated this community in many, many ways.
GOD, BUDDHA, UNIVERSE, please bless the people who have lost their lives becuase of these lies – and please prevent these fools from hurting any other people by allowing more homes to be built anywhere nearby.
I used to work for Norman Riley. He was an upstanding manager who was passionate about his work and the environment. He took his position seriously and didn’t use it as a political bargaining chip. He was knowledgeable, responsible and one of the most dedicated people I have had the pleasure to work for.
He was also extremely loyal. He wasn’t just loyal to the people who worked for him, he was loyal to the people above him because he believed in the basic integrity of those driving DTSC. It’s his faith in people and his dedication to the environment which has earned him loyalty.
I think it was his belief that if he protected the environment as far as the letter of the law would allow him, there would be requisite loyalty and support from his superiors. This would seem a fair and equitable return for someone who has dedicated 25 years to protecting human life. If Mr. Riley made a mistake, it was in that he believed that his superiors would be as loyal to him as he has been to them and to the environment.
“People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones”, a saying so very relevant here with certain community members. A paragraph removed is an indication of truth being far too painful to bear, the truth being certain problem activists who strive to alienate instead of uniting VOLUNTEERS. That is all we are: VOLUNTEERS with no secret agenda, no secret meetings with DTSC and other regulators, no secret visits to Boeing/NASA/DOE, no private sidebar discussions, no hoarding of public documents and files and emails, and no ‘group-think’ goal of having newcomers only following your agenda and doing only what is important to YOU else be marked as disloyal then ostracized and dictated to a “my house my rules” credo at public gatherings — such arrogance. If this problem is to not continue another 15 years, certain activists need to go the way of Mr. Riley and leave.
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This all has to stop. The rumors, backstabing mass forwarding emails, everyone in a frenzy of distrust. It is time that everyone calms down, figures out who our project leader is and let him prove himself worthy of our respect. No one can win this war with the troops so divided. Everyone is either a part of the solution or a part of the problem. Please, I can’t take another 15 years of this.
Glad he is bye-bye. Too much cover-up. If you think comments were left out here at Runkle, think about similar offsite locales like Dayton Canyon (Riley’s led DTSC team fails to reply to comments by the public just like here at Runkle times many instances). Indeed, the Chatsworth Reservoir is also ignored by Mr. Riley, and that place is highly contaminated; Woosley Creek, Bell Creek, Las Virgenes Creek, Chesebro Creek, Palo Comado Creek, Black Canyon, and et al — all tainted by Rocketdyne industrial wastes and Mr. Riley arrogantly blows them off as if Mother Nature does not exist. Not to mention the Calabasas Landfill with its beta radiation higher on the Rockedyne side and the secret backroad from the SSFL used to dump radioactive wastes under the cloak of darkness — HELLO ! DTSC, where are you ?!
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Mr. Hirsch is no angel either, let’s be honest. In collusion with DTSC and especially past inept-minded regulators, it is Hirsch who intentionally covers up atrocities of the Ventura County permitting process that encouraged the contamination from onset way back in the 1940s and 1950s (and on through present day: hint, Google up “Ventura County Burn Days at SSFL Burn Pits” and read the SAIC 1991 document). Without such permits and other permitting filings, there would not have been any polluter, any radiation, any TCDD Dioxin, any chemical contamination. Hirsch also sides with the City of Los Angeles in their cover-up of the poisoned Department of Water and Power Chatsworth Reservoir as well as the County of LA for its role in permitting contamination to be trucked and spilled within its boundaries. Decision makers make decisions. And some cities and both counties are culpable participants in this mess, whether or not Dan Hirsch likes it or not.
The friend of your enemy is your enemy. For Pete’s sake, the polluter here would use its own employees to test poisons on, and then publish the results in medical journals stating said poison is safe (unbeknownst to the reader is the extremely minute amount of toxin administered to the human-guinea-pig-Boeing-employee over several days).
If the parties involved at present and above would have chosen to live a clean life, there would be no unearthly delay in the cleanup. I challenge you, special reader, to see through the fog and do what is right. If something does not seem right, it usually isn’t. Attend meetings when you can. Stand up, speak robustly, and question ignorance. The upcoming new California Administration is going to need your record to learn from in quick time, so please comment when commenting is solicited. And, by all means, THINK INDEPENDENTLY, else be one of the sheep being led to slaughter. Please read below;
Quoted from “A Treatise on Military Weapons Containing the Radioactive Material: Depleted Uranium”, by Lynnie Howe:
“Atomic secrecy has corrupted American democracy. And the rationale for this corroding secrecy has always been national security, the need to keep powerful information from falling into the hands of the current US enemy. Nuclear scientists even today regard the Q security clearance as a badge of honor, even while it signifies a determination not to spill the truth.
But now secrecy has mutated into an instrument of self-preservation not for the security of the nation but for the profits of the nuclear industry. The [keeping] of secrets has evolved into the telling of lies. And the deception is being perpetrated not on the enemies of the US but on its tax-paying citizens, whose contributions finance US atomic atrocities and line the coffers of nuclear profiteers.
The reason for this secrecy and deception has also changed. The nuclear industry’s greatest fear is no longer of an “enemy’; It fears instead that the truth about the environmental and health effects of radiation, if fully conveyed to the American people, will result in the collapse of the nuclear industry with its obscene profits.”
Again, please put thinking cap on and be independent.
No John, it would make a GRAND OPERA, with Norm singing the role of the canary in the coal mine. Apparently an explosion is imminent!
This would be such grand theatre if it weren’t for the fact it’s so damn tragic.