On the eve of the conversation I describe below, Chronogram magazine, for which I’ve written the horoscope since 1995, held a party in Rhinebeck. Outside the party, I spoke for a moment with Jason Stern, my friend of many years and then-publisher of Chronogram. I said, seemingly out of nowhere, that one of the blights on my conscience was not being able to shut down the dioxin contaminated dorms at SUNY New Paltz. You can read about that incident on this website. The developments in this article happened the next day.
Kingston, NY
I just had the most interesting conversation of my journalism career since Dec. 29, 1991; in truth one of the most interesting conversations of my life. That was the day that the PCB transformers exploded at SUNY New Paltz — a small state college campus in upstate New York. This is a story that some of my longer term readers may be familiar with. In case you’re not, here is a summary that I wrote in 2007. The dorms I am describing, Bliss, Capen, Gage and Scudder halls, house about 1,300 students a year, nearly all of them freshmen and sophomores.
I have to protect my source, but I can tell you what I learned. He is someone who was involved on a high level in state government at the time, whose name I knew, and who based on his own conscience took action. I hadn’t heard about this whole scenario till tonight.
The botched PCB and dioxin “cleanup” of six buildings cost somewhere around $100 million. When that much money changes hands, he said, the mob is always involved, on many levels. This is why the coverup went across clear party lines. It’s why The New York Times (despite doing two short pieces on me personally) never actually dug into the story. It’s why Gov. Mario Cuomo stayed away.
He said that there was an employee in the state Office of General Services (OGS), the lead agency — which I have rarely mentioned in my coverage, but whose documents I tracked for years. Think of OGS as “the state itself” rather than one of its functionary parts. This person served as an “angel” who would sign off on anything, for kickbacks. At certain points the known cost of the cleanup was approaching a million dollars a month, and he would approve any bill. The Internet was crude at the time (mid-1990s) but there were many emails exchanged that documented every move they made. I asked why they were so brazen about it, particularly during my peak of work on the issue — I was on it around the clock for years, at that point.
“They just didn’t think they were going to get caught,” he said.