This week, the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) is set to announce the second-largest civil penalty it has ever leveled against an industry or institution for environmental breaches.

But the culprit is not a forest-destroying chip mill or a water-polluting textile manufacturer. The guilty party is the state itself, namely the Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT), which has agreed to a combination of cash penalties and environmental cleanup totaling just over $3 million. The size of the retribution is second only to the fines and other corrective action TDEC has directed against the federal government for breaches in Oak Ridge.

“Other than with the federal government, it’s the largest,” TDEC general counsel Joe Sanders says of the agreement between TDEC and TDOT, which both agencies characterize as a “landmark” document. A stack of paper half-an-inch thick, the agreement details dozens of violations at 32 TDOT facilities across the state ranging from illegal dumping to leaking hazardous waste materials to water pollution violations. In all, TDOT admits to violating the Tennessee Waste Disposal Act, the Tennessee Hazardous Waste Management Act, and the Water Quality Control Act of 1977.

In 1997, TDOT officials began an investigation into their department’s facilities after they discovered unauthorized waste disposal at the TDOT regional facility in Jackson. Department officials hired an independent consultant to conduct the investigation, and now, fully three years later, the violations have been tallied.

Interestingly, the agreement between the two state departments was penned in March—in the midst of the Legislature’s debate over the state budget and the merits of an income tax—but the agreement was never publicly announced and probably won’t be until later this week. “This was filed back in March, and obviously, it was public record at that time,” says TDOT spokeswoman Luanne Grandinetti. “There were a lot of things that had to happen, and we were wrapped up in the budget debate.”

Under the so-called “consent order,” TDOT will pay $112,500 in cash for the violations, and the remaining $2.8 million or so will be spent on cleanup in lieu of further fines. “We’ve agreed to clean up illegal dump sites that were caused by outside parties,” Grandinetti says. “Obviously, we’re going to take care of the ones on our facilities. That being said, we’ve agreed to clean up these illegal dump sites that weren’t caused by us—illegal tire dumps and places where people can’t identify owners. It’s administration compensation, basically, for environmental deficiencies by us.”

The violations, of course, are not good news. Critics of TDOT—and there are lots of them—find it contemptible that state officials have withheld the announcement of this agreement, particularly during a time when government waste should have been part of the budget conversation.

“I just think it’s outrageous that they would sit on this,” says TDOT critic Gene Cotton. “Our government has a responsibility to come forth with information like this.” But leave it to state officials to try to put a happy face on a staggering situation: “The good news in terms of the Department of Transportation is we self-reported all this,” Grandinetti says.

Adds Mary Moody, TDOT’s general counsel, “It was not a case of somebody coming after us and catching us doing things. We found these things ourselves and then reported them to TDEC and worked with them to figure out what they wanted us to do, aside from obviously correcting those mistakes in our own shop.”

Kim Olson, director of public information for TDEC, agrees. “I hope that this is a turning point for TDEC and for TDOT—especially for TDOT.”

The timing of the announcement could be better. The massive penalty comes on the heels of a recent $350,000 fine against TDOT for other environmental violations. Officials at TDEC found that the road-building agency and Wright Brothers Construction, the contractor working on an 8.6-mile segment of state Route 840 in Dickson, failed to provide enough erosion control on the job site there. Excessive runoff from the work site contaminated a stream system serving as the water source for 30,000 customers of the Turnbull-White Bluff Utility District (as reported in “State of Repairs,” Nashville Scene, June 1).

Once contaminated, Dickson County’s main water treatment plant had to shut down for hours on end last month. So much clay had gathered in the waterways—including the Harpeth River—that the plant wasn’t able to treat the water. The violations happened despite promises from the state that construction wouldn’t have any adverse environmental impact on the streams there.

TDEC’s findings leave both TDOT and the contractor liable for violation of the state’s Water Quality Control Act. The two parties were ordered to “immediately implement appropriate permanent and temporary erosion and sediment controls necessary to bring the entire project into compliance.” They also were ordered to pay a $350,000 fine, $150,000 of which is due within the next month. The remaining $200,000 must be spent on an environmental-improvement project.

“There is some redemption in this, but it’s almost like we’re wasting taxpayer money to sit here and have one state agency fine another,” says Kyle Ruf, one of three commissioners for the Turnbull-White Bluff Utility District. In addition to the fine, Ruf notes, the state will have to remunerate the utility district for costs directly related to dealing with the contaminated water, which he says will amount to “$40,000 to $50,000 easy, and probably six figures before it’s all over....

“It would sure seem to me that the process would work better if the state agency with the expertise—being TDEC—would have recognized that there was such a big project going on that they would have worked hand-in-hand with their sister agency to prevent things from happening.”

The hefty civil penalty imposed on TDOT is the latest ammunition for critics of the estimated $1.2 billion 840 loop, a nearly 185-mile ring road that will encircle Nashville with a concrete belt, keeping an average distance of 35 miles from the city’s center. Critics have said all along that the construction of the road will cause catastrophic environmental damage, and they have condemned the state for failing to do the proper environmental-impact studies.

If fully constructed, the highway will connect interstates 24, 40, and 65 on both the north and south sides of the city—cutting through Dickson, Montgomery, Cheatham, Robertson, Sumner, and Wilson counties to the north. The southern loop would also slice through Dickson and Wilson counties, along with Rutherford, Williamson, and Hickman counties.