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The Cincinnati Beacon
Assistant County Admin, Jeff Aluotto, Will Not Answer Simple Questions
Friday, September 28, 2007
Posted by The Dean of Cincinnati
A few days ago, we received a letter from Assistant County Administrator Jeff Aluotto, where he claimed an earlier article by Michael Earl Patton was in error concerning whether the County performed due diligence by conducting an Environmental Site Assessment prior to accepting the old Kahn’s site for the proposed new jail. A closer look, however, at Aluotto’s letter reveals several discrepancies—and Aluotto himself has been unresponsive thus far to follow up questions.
For example, in Patton’s original article, he wrote that “Hamilton County accepted the ‘gift’ of the old Kahn’s site without doing an Environmental Site Assessment (ESA).” Aluotto’s letter purports to refute this claim, but a careful analysis of the letter’s language shows a different story:
The Phase I assessment, submitted to the company on January 26, 2007, was conducted to professional industry standards, by a qualified third party environmental consulting firm, and was followed (again before transfer of ownership) by an additional baseline Phase II assessment which involved the analysis of multiple groundwater and soil samples.
Firstly, you should notice the word “company” in the first line. It looks like Aluotto is referring to an ESA that was contracted by Sara Lee several months before the transfer to Hamilton County. That does not mean Hamilton County did an ESA, it means that Sara Lee did an ESA.
But read even more carefully as the passage continues: Aluotto claims that samples were taken of soil and groundwater, but he does not say whether anything was found in those samples!
In follow up messages, we asked Aluotto for the name of the County employee responsible for analyzing the results of this alleged third party ESA. No response.
It is our understanding that a copy of this ESA has been acquired, and we hope to report to you on its actual scientific details in the next few days. But wouldn’t it be something if Hamilton County’s jail plan was to house prisoners on toxic land?
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