Salvage Yard Is Easy Target
For Politics of Fear And Safety

By Michael Bradley

BOURNE, MA – Using fear and playing upon the human desire for assured safety to justify political action is certainly not a new tactic, but it was unusual to see it employed recently by a local selectman as a means to punish a local salvage yard owner for doing what the state wanted and the town demanded.

Knowlton’s Auto Salvage, located in Bourne’s village of Sagamore, came before the board of selectmen on July 13^th to present a soil testing report that the company itself commissioned and for which it paid thousands of dollars, all to meet town and state Department of Environmental Protection, DEP, requirements, and to comply with promises made to the Bourne selectmen.

The report, based on a series of test borings - called ‘test wells’- indicated what anyone might expect from an auto junkyard that was begun before WWII; that is, there are contaminants in the topsoil. But the report also provided the Town of Bourne with a considerable amount of good news, the key points of which are the facts that soil contamination is only inches deep and is not migrating. In other words, whatever problems exist on the site seem in fact be contained on the site.

There were other positive elements in the report, but all of those factors were irrelevant to the two selectmen on the five-member board who have made it clear they are opposed to the continuation of Knowlton’s Auto Salvage as a local business, no matter what facts are at hand. And what followed at the July 27th meeting may well be considered a classic example of point-of-view politics.

Sel. Carol Cheli, the newest member of the board, took the lead, issuing her own ‘report’ on the Knowlton’s report, essentially ignoring all the current and positive information and carefully culling the documents for negative statements made by the state Department of Environmental Engineering dating back 12 years to 1992, then moving forward only to1998. That was convenient because that was the period when the DEP made the broadest and most sweeping allegations against Knowlton’s, much of which was later shown to relate to an adjacent gas station with leaking tanks.

Ms. Cheli’s culling of the report focused on the most dramatic language in the old letters and statements from the DEP, while excluding the more recent information.

And of course veteran Sel. Richard LaFarge, a longtime opponent of the salvage yard, provided Ms. Cheli support, first by using his position as secretary of the board to allow her to issue a ‘report’ during the communications part of the agenda, where the secretary reads letters and documents provided to the board. By including Cheli’s ‘report’ as a communication, he allowed her to avoid the necessity of posting the ‘report’ as an agenda item. But he then went further. He passed her ‘commentary/report’ back to her to read, therefore making it a de facto agenda item, upon which Ms. Cheli was able to add further comments and call for the closure of the salvage yard.

As a simple ‘communication’ to the board, no additional comments would have been possible, nor would a motion seeking any action be possible; it would simply have been a point of information. And while even that approach was stretching the purpose and intent of the communication section of the meeting, the ‘report’ would at least not have had the weight of a posted agenda item; the purpose of posting agenda items, of course, is to allow the affected parties to be present during the meeting and respond to whatever statements are made prior to any action being taken.

The Anderson family, through the machinations of Sel. LaFarge and Sel. Cheli, were denied that ability.

Interestingly, during the meeting Chairman of Selectmen Linda Zuern asked Secretary LaFarge to read into the record a letter from Knowlton’s attorney, and a letter from the environmental engineer who conducted the tests, and he flatly refused to fulfill his obligations as secretary to the board. The chairman had to read the letters, which soundly contradicted Ms. Cheli’s assertions, which perhaps was the reason Sel. LaFarge was reluctant to read them into the record.

Selectmen Cheli and LaFarge didn’t succeed in this latest attempt to close an old family business; Cheli’s call for the business to be given 30 days notice was not even brought to a vote. But ironically Selectmen Cheli and LaFarge did succeed in putting the business in some potential jeopardy.

Sel. Thomas Barlow, in an apparent attempt to find a compromise between Cheli’s demand that the business owned by the Anderson family be given "30 days to cease and desist" operations that have been ongoing for some seventy years, moved that the board of health investigate Ms. Cheli’s alarmist assertions by on-site inspections.

This attempt to find a middle ground was well intentioned, and it was unanimously approved; yet it still served to provide a level of success to Ms. Cheli and her fear mongering style of politics. Despite having completed, in good faith, the Phase 1 criteria set forth by the state DEP, the Anderson family business – Knowlton’s – must now meet additional criteria before it can move toward Phase 2 of the cleanup process.

The hope of opponents of the salvage yard has been raised; that hope of course is that somehow someone in an official capacity will make a statement or issue a report that will indicate there is a reason to close the business rather than let the cleanup process continue. And the great irony of all of this is that it has been a Commonwealth of Massachusetts policy, for decades, to try in every way possible to work with and support business owners who are trying to remedy pollution problems; this policy is extremely pragmatic since by allowing the business to profitably continue and to handle the cleanup itself over a period of time, there is minimal cost to the state and town or city.

Those who would like to see Knowlton’s Auto Salvage put out of business do not seem to care about such financial factors, a point which was clearly illustrated by the attempt to punish the company for providing a report indicating the current status of the property.

8/13/04

Editor's note: In the spring, 2004, Bourne selectmen's race there were two open seats and five candidates, one of which was Michael Bradley. The election was won by Galon 'Skip' Barlow and Carol A. Cheli.