Two Lewis County brothers, both DPW officials, accused of failing to test wastewater, faking records
Julie Abbass, Watertown Daily Times, N.Y.
5 min read
Apr. 30—LOWVILLE — State investigations into fraudulent wastewater plant test reporting have resulted in charges against two brothers working as public works department superintendents for two southern Lewis County villages. The brothers have resigned from their positions.
State Department of Environmental Conservation police filed a number of misdemeanor charges of falsifying business records against Shane T. Rogers, 45, who was the Lyons Falls superintendent for public works for 16 years, and Jeremy W. Rogers, 42, who held the position for Port Leyden.
Both of the former superintendents were trained and certified for water treatment plant operations, not wastewater treatment, but because of the shortage of this type of specialist in the state, the DEC allows municipal workers to perform the daily testing after receiving training by certified operators.
Certified operators must oversee the plants by performing monthly tests, auditing daily test results and filing records with DEC to ensure the wastewater released into rivers is safe after being processed through the plant.
The certified operator employed by the village of Lowville has been providing this service for Lyons Falls and Port Leyden outside of his normal job commitment, according to the mayors of both villages.
Although there are a number of daily log entries by the brothers that are under investigation, the mayors emphasize that the post-process wastewater sent into the Black River by their systems met all safety standards.
"They were testing properly once a month so we know that the numbers were okay, but they were supposed to check them daily," said Lyons Falls Mayor Donna M. Dolhof.
Mrs. Dolhof declined to provide details about when and how the alleged made-up entries were discovered because of the ongoing investigation.
The wastewater plant operator overseeing the two village plants could not be reached for more information and the DEC did not respond to a request for the charging documents for both men, making it unclear which brother was suspected of falsifying documents first, whether or not there was a connection between the practices of the brothers and when Shane Rogers was charged.
Shane Rogers' social media posts indicate his resignation at the end of January "was not (his) choice" and on March 1, that his brother was "let go in Port Leyden" in a situation that was "the same thing exactly one month apart" from his situation in Lyons Falls.
Charges were not mentioned in any of Mr. Rogers' many posts and comments on his resignation.
The Port Leyden test results in question recorded by Jeremy Rogers were discovered when Mayor Shawn M. Smith met with the certified operator early in the year for the operator "to get his paperwork" at the plant.
"There was fresh snowfall that morning and no footprints or tracks going from the effluent tank down to the facility influent facility tank but we didn't think anything of it until we went to the building and found the (testing) numbers had been filled out but nobody had gone to the tanks where the samples needed to be drawn," Mr. Smith said, adding that it was obvious that "they were just writing numbers down and not retrieving the samples."
The DEC was informed immediately of the situation, according to the mayor.
The investigator sent by the agency used the new equipment for wastewater testing Mr. Rogers had helped the village purchase in December to view every time it was used for testing by downloading the apparatus' automatically logged information. That information was compared to Mr. Rogers' handwritten and initialed daily testing forms.
It is not known if the testing instrument used in Lyons Falls had the same capabilities.
"We don't know how long he was falsifying the documents because the numbers he's been writing down and falsifying were all in compliance with the DEC requirement," said Mr. Smith. "We dodged a bullet. We got very, very lucky that something did not happen where the river got polluted in all those months we can verify and prove that he wasn't doing tests — God forbid if we had polluted that river what the lawsuits and the fines would have been for the village... He got lucky and the village got lucky. He put us and the village and the taxpayers in an awful predicament."
The villages have each replaced the Rogers brothers. The Port Leyden board hired William A. Amato, who was hired briefly early in the year to work with Mr. Rogers — a position Shane Rogers also applied for after resigning from Lyons Falls according to his Facebook page. Mr. Smith said Mr. Amato has had an application filed with the village for about a year.
"It's a serious thing, so we did everything we could to protect the village and get our wastewater facility back in order and get it back to the way it should be," the Port Leyden mayor said.
Mr. Smith, who has been working for the town of Lyonsdale for the past three years, applied for and was appointed to the superintendent position by the Lyons Falls board in early February.
Mr. Smith and Mr. Amato have completed their water treatment plant operator training and certification but are on the waiting list for the next wastewater plant training in the region which will be held in Morrisville in October.
In a "visioning summit" last week of municipal leaders in the Tug Hill Commission's River Area Council of Government group, non-profit organizations, business owners and BOCES leadership, West Carthage Mayor Scott Burto asked BOCES to look into providing training for wastewater technicians because of the double jeopardy created by a lack of technicians and a lack of training for new technicians. BOCES Principal Mallory G. Douglass said this is something that is already under discussion in the BOCES community.
In the cases of Lyons Falls and Port Leyden, however, it is not clear that specialized training would have changed the situation but having a second set of eyes on the record keeping uncovered the discrepancies.
Shane Rogers successfully filed a petition to run as the Working Families candidate, according to county Board of Elections information online.
