Defund the DEC

I heard a line once: all man needs to be evil is an excuse. I've thought about it a lot. Looked back at history. I'm afraid it might be true.

Right now, our politicians are letting Micron poison Central New York's drinking water because they have an excuse. The excuse is the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. "The DEC is on it. It's their job, not mine."

When I told County Executive Ryan McMahon about Micron's PFAS discharge into the Oneida River, that is exactly what he told me. The DEC is on it. They're professionals. They're making sure Micron complies with the laws.

I've been working with the DEC for forty years. I know better. Let me tell you a few things I've seen.

Story 1The dual wall tank scam

When it came out that 25% of New York's underground fuel tanks were leaking, the DEC pushed through a law requiring dual wall tanks. Tank owners across the state spent millions complying.

I FOILed the spill database — three big books of printed data — and ran the numbers myself. Ninety percent of the leaks weren't in the tanks. They were in the piping. The new law didn't require dual wall piping.

I brought the data to the DEC. They agreed with my analysis. They never changed the law.

Why? Because changing it would mean admitting the law they had just passed didn't actually solve the problem. Protecting their image — claiming they had "fixed" the leaking tank crisis — was more important to them than protecting our kids from benzene, toluene, and the other cancer-causing chemicals still pouring out of single-wall piping into our groundwater.

Story 2Promoted instead of fired

I worked at Environmental Oil, a spill cleanup contractor. The DEC was steering most of the emergency cleanup work in our region to one of our competitors. The DEC employee making those assignments was building a hunting camp in the Adirondacks at the time — and the competitor's crews were doing most of the work on his camp for free.

We told his bosses. They didn't fire him. They didn't even discipline him. They promoted him — moved him to Albany and put him in charge of Major Oil Storage Facilities, the bulk fuel terminals holding millions of gallons of gasoline.

I was selling tank farm liners to those facilities. Half my potential clients told me the same DEC official was now steering them toward a different liner product — a much more expensive one made by a major defense contractor. I pulled the spec sheet. The product was flammable. That's what he was telling tank farm operators to line their gasoline storage with.

I won most of those clients on the merits. I could never convince him. He just smiled and laughed at me. The DEC did nothing about it.

Story 3The worst compliance rate in the country

A late-1990s EPA study found that over 67% of New York's underground storage tank facilities were out of compliance with state and federal regulations — one of the worst rates in the country.

While law-abiding gas station owners spent millions of dollars upgrading their equipment to meet the law, the bad operators just ignored it. Nobody enforced anything. The cheaters grew. The honest operators sold out to them. The DEC watched it happen.

When a leaking tank contaminated a gas station property, you know what they did with the contaminated soil? They piled it up out back to "air out." Meaning the benzene and toluene vented straight into the atmosphere — and into the lungs of every neighbor downwind — instead of the groundwater. The DEC let it happen.

The Micron PlaybookSame agency. Infinitely bigger stakes.

When McMahon told me the DEC was on it, my forty years told me to look. Here is what I found. Buckle up.

They let Micron route around the whole framework.

If you want an industrial wastewater discharge permit in New York, you fill out a form that requires your SIC code — Standard Industrial Classification. The DEC keeps a list of the SIC codes most likely to discharge PFAS. Land on that list and you are a "priority facility": you monitor your discharge, you report it, and the DEC is supposed to write water-quality-based limits into your permit.

Semiconductor manufacturing — SIC 3674 — is on that list. The DEC added it in August 2024. So the agency's own framework already names the industry doing the most PFAS damage as a priority. That part, they got right.

Here is the part that matters. That priority-facility framework only governs industrial plants that hold their own discharge permit. Micron does not hold one. Micron's wastewater is piped into the County's Oak Orchard municipal sewage plant — and the County holds the permit. On paper, Micron is not an industrial discharger at all. It is a customer of a sewage plant. And sewage plants fall under a separate, far weaker set of DEC rules — monitoring, with no enforceable PFAS limits required.

They did not need to erase anything. The structure does the work: the largest semiconductor fab in the Western Hemisphere — discharging more wastewater than its other seven facilities combined — slips out of the industrial framework entirely, because its pipe runs through a county-owned plant first.

They denied every single request for the only test that catches what Micron is hiding.

When the EPA started regulating PFAS after the Cape Fear, North Carolina cancer cluster, the semiconductor industry switched to different PFAS compounds. When the EPA required testing for those, the industry switched again. The shell game has been running for over a decade.

The test that catches the rest is called Total Oxidizable Precursor Assay (TOP Assay). It detects the "dark PFAS" — the compounds the industry is using specifically because they don't show up in Method 1633.

During the public comment period on Micron's permit, at least twenty people — engineers, chemists, PhDs — asked the DEC to require the TOP Assay.

The DEC's answer to every one of them was: request denied.

Why the fuck would the DEC refuse to require the only test that would tell us whether Micron is dumping cancer-causing, thyroid-destroying, immune-system-wrecking, developmental-disorder-causing chemicals into the drinking water of half a million people?

Because they don't want to know. And they don't want you to know. Because if the test came back hot, the agency would have to act, the Governor's $100 billion deal would be in jeopardy, and someone might have to admit the permit was a fraud from the start.

What Comes NextBoise is what happens next. And it's already a catastrophe.

I want you to read this slowly.

The City of Boise just bonded over half a billion dollars to try to clean up the mess Micron made at their existing Idaho fab. Micron originally agreed to co-invest in the cleanup. Then they walked away. Boise residents are paying for it on their water bills.

The Boise River is contaminated. Not might be. Is.

Once PFAS contaminates farmland, it stays there. Forever. That is what "forever chemicals" means. Every crop grown there from now until the heat death of the universe will carry that load.

Maine and Connecticut have banned biosolids land application entirely because of PFAS. Michigan and Minnesota require testing before any biosolid can touch a field. New York has no such restriction. Onondaga County's plan has been to sell the dried biosolids from Metro Syracuse — which is where Oak Orchard's sludge gets trucked — as fertilizer. Once Micron's PFAS load enters that system, it will go onto Central New York farmland. Our soil. Our food. Our kids.

That is the same process about to start in Clay, New York. Same company. Same wastewater. Same playbook. The treatment plant that's about to be designed and built is identical in concept to what failed in Boise. The discharge goes into the Oneida River, the Oswego River, Lake Ontario — drinking water for over 500,000 Central New Yorkers and millions more downstream through the St. Lawrence River.

My hometown is Alexandria Bay. The Thousand Islands. That is downstream of this.