October 26, 2000
Writer's Note: On October 18, 2000, I interviewed the Executive Director of the Huntington Sanitary Board, Robert Trocin about a wide range of topics, but the interview kept returning to the issue of grinder pumps and the Inwood-Shockey Project.
Approximately a week later, Bob Letendre called me and wanted to state his side of the story, since he and Gil Vanderkraats had been the chief adversaries of the mayor and sanitary board about this project.
The interview that follows happened Wednesday afternoon, October 25, 2000. The interview is mainly with Mr. Letendre, but Mr. Vanderkraats was present through the entire interview.
HNN would also like to state that the views concerning legalities or illegalities, etc. expressed in this interview are solely the opinions of Mr. Letendre and Mr. Vanderkraats.
"We want this to be a rebuttal to what Trocin said in your interview," Bob Letendre began. "A lot of the things he said in there aren't true, and we want to get that out."
"First off, you've got a hill," Letendre said. "You've got two sides to a hill. One side is already a gravity system. That's number one. Number two: grinder pumps. We went to city council and we went to the business meetings with the sanitary board, and we related to them all the experience that we have found people having with grinder pumps. We called several engineering firms in Charleston about grinder pumps. They said all we needed to know was "stay the hell away from them". We had a meeting with the Sanitary Board in Charleston and they said all you need to know about grinder pumps is stay the hell away from them. We won't allow them on our system unless the person owns them because the maintenance is unbelievable."
Letendre and Vanderkraats said that an engineer from Columbia Gas in Wayne came to city council on his own and told council what was happening in Northern Wayne because of grinder pumps. Letendre said he urged the council not to use grinder pumps because they would be disastrous to maintain and they break down all the time.
They also said a woman from Florida also went to council and told council that where she lived in Florida, they were going to put grinder pumps, and they did research for it and found one disaster story after another, including one town where it was so bad the city dug it up and replaced it with gravity, eating the cost of the problem because it had gotten so bad, including sewers backing up in hotels which led to threats of lawsuits.
"The mayor of South Charleston was approached by a subdivision just outside of South Charleston, a very expensive subdivision; very big homes," Letendre said. "The whole subdivision is on grinder pumps. They want to annex them into the city, and the city won't take them because they are on grinder pumps."
Letendre said that the mayor and city council knew about all of this before the grinder pumps were installed.
"A prudent person would start looking into this before they did it," Letendre said. "And not just say 'well, Greg said that's fine' and go off of Greg Mannetti at Chester (Engineering). A prudent person would've said 'wait a minute, I've spent a lot of people's money here.'"
Letendre said the sanitary board paid Chester Engineering to do three (3) feasibility studies for the same project.
"Nobody's ever heard of that," Letendre said. "You do one feasibility study. They did three. And all three of them were for gravity. Not grinder pumps. We've got copies of them."
After finding that, they decided to take things one step further.
"We contacted Lawson Engineering in Beckley, WV," Letendre said. "We talked to Mike Lawson about the project. We drove to Beckley and gave him the spec books and the plans. He went over that like a surgeon. This guy's put sewer lines through the mountains of West Virginia. He knows what he's talking about."
Letendre also added that other than the sewer line at 40th Street, the Inwood-Shockey sewer project is the only other sewer system Greg Mannetti has put in.
"(Lawson) agreed to meet us and look at the area," Letendre said. "He asked for a topo map, so we had one made, and he came three times and walked through the whole area. He worked with the State Geologist in Charleston about this whole area to see if there were any possibilities with cave-ins or anything like that. He addressed it...and found ways to take care of it."
"He sat down and made a feasibility study for gravity," Letendre said. "He then came back to Huntington; he met right here in my house with me and Gil and Dallan Fields, and typed up his presentation. Then Dallan took him to the mayor's office. Lawson proceeded to show her how they could do this with gravity for a million dollars less. In his proposal he also had built in enough money to buy the right of ways around the back of the property and give the people enough that would take care of the connections. In other words, they wouldn't have to put out anything, and it was still a million dollars less."
Letendre said they had a big "go around" with Chester Engineering, and then Mannetti came in after lunch, and they went on and on until Lawson turned to Fields and said, "You're wasting your time talking to these people. They're not going even look at it. They're not going to do anything." And, according to Letendre, Lawson's final words before he left to go back to Beckley were, "I'm glad they're not spending my money."
Letendre also said Mannetti accused Lawson of trying to take the job away from Chester, but Lawson said he would "sign a document right now saying I don't want the job. I'm in Beckley. I don't want it, I won't take it, and I'll sign a document that that's not what I'm doing here."
"A prudent person would have taken those plans and looked at it and double checked it," Letendre reiterated. "And for him (Trocin) to say that they (the city and sanitary board) were mislead and they didn't realize about the gravity and they didn't realize you could put it on a hill and that it might cave and all that stuff is not so. There're mountains and mountains of evidence that they knew all about this stuff. Engineers from Wayne, engineer companies from Charleston, Charleston Sanitary Board, people getting up and giving their own experiences, engineers from Beckley, everyone was telling them the same thing, showing them the same thing, and you put that along with all three feasibilities calling for gravity! They paid them three times to come up with the same thing!"
Letendre said that when Lawson made his presentation to the Mayor Dean, he included how much the money is worth each year that you spend on the maintenance, etc. for both systems.
"The maintenance for gravity is nil," Letendre said. "The grinder pumps, taking in the cost, the money, and all that stuff, just goes up."
"Where one is steady," Vanderkraats added, "the other is exponential."
According to Letendre, when they talked to the Charleston Sanitary Board about grinder pumps, the CSB laughed them out of the meeting.
"They said they didn't even know Huntington was that dumb," Letendre said.
"Something else you need to know," Vanderkraats said. "The mayor is the chairman of the sanitary board. There're three members of the sanitary board. She's the chairman, and two appointed people. She's the one that controls it. She knows."
"By law the mayor is the chairman," Letendre added.
"So when he (Trocin) said 'the board', he might as well say 'She knew about it, and she's at fault.'"
"He (Trocin) says it going to cost $6 million to fix it," Letendre said. "It was $3.6 and Lawson showed them how to do it for $2.6, and he also had over $200,000 in his feasibility study that was fat, in case they ran into something. And he was paying all the people right away, and there was still $1 million left over. It's scare figures, that's all it is."
"He (Trocin) said he wasn't there for any of this," Letendre said. "But here's the point. The mayor (Dean) knew about all of this, she's the chairman of the sanitary board, and had all this knowledge. Mannetti didn't have her sign a legal contract. She signed a legal contract. There was nothing passed by ordinance of council about it, so it's illegal. If the project is illegal, then the bond they got is illegal. And Trocin was there when they did the illegal bond. So he's not lily white either. He was the executive director of the sanitary board."
"The next point is," Letendre said. "Chester couldn't do anything unless (the sanitary board) OK'd it. So anything that Chester might have done wrong was OK'd by the Sanitary Board, of which (Mayor Dean) is the chairman."
"That's the gospel," Vanderkraats said. "She was told not to do the project, and she went upon herself to do it."
"And after they do all of this and blamed everything on Chester when this thing got going," Letendre said. "Guess who they got to supervise the project.......CHESTER! Talk about putting the fox in charge of the hen house!"
The auditor's have already said that the project was illegal. Letendre also wrote a letter to City Clerk Ann Shaye, asking for a copy of the ordinance passed by council about the Inwood-Shockey project and a copy of the advertisement in a "Class-A" newspaper which must be done when such an ordinance is passed. Shaye wrote Letendre back saying she could not send him a copy of the ordinance because the ordinance does not exist.
HNN has received a copy of BOTH letters, and will be putting them on the site in the next few days.
"(Mayor Dean) signed a sworn affidavit saying everything was in compliance with WV code," Letendre said.
"She lied," Vanderkraats said.
"So not only did she lie," Letendre said. "She defrauded the government out of money. Steptoe and Johnson also signed it."
"Now, everything we've said is mine and Gil's opinion," Letendre said. "We have a right to our opinion."
Letendre said that if the state auditor's chief investigator proves this was illegal, the mayor can be prosecuted. He said someone would have to come up with the money. The mayor could be prosecuted for fraud, which is a felony, and you cannot hold public office as a felon.
The legalities or illegalities expressed in this interview are the opinions of Mr. Letendre and Mr. Vanderkraats.
The City of Huntington's Sanitary Board is still under investigation by the West Virginia State Auditor's Office.
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T. Michael Murdock, HNN News Editor