ILLINOIS
POLLUTION
CONTROL
BOARD
August
10,
1984
Petitioner,
)
PCB
84~45
)
84~6l
ILLINOIS
ENVIRONMENTAL
)
84~68
PROTECTION
AGENCY,
CONCURRING
STATEMENT
(by
B.
Forcade):
I
agree
with
the
majority
Order
as
written
on all issues,
save the ruling on attorney~clientprivileges
On that issue,
I
believe additional explanation is needed~ The
Agency
claims
that
notes of a April
12,
1984, meeting between the Agency and
the
Attorney
General~soffice are subject to attorney-client
privilege and
not
discoverable
or admissable as evidence,
Waste
Management disagrees.
The chronology
and substance of
these
three cases is very important
in
understanding
the
issues.
Each
of the three
cases
involves groundwater
or
groundwater monitoring
for the ESL site.
The first case,
PCB
84-45,
concerns the supplemental permit
for an
expanded groundwater monitoring program.
The
permit was
issued
with conditions about
March
2,
1984,
and
Waste Management
appealed certain conditions in that
permit to this
Board on April
9.
About
April
20,
the Agency denied an operating permit
for
Trench
11, claiming,
in
part,
that
monitoring results
required by
the supplemental permit challenged
in PCB 84-45 had
not
been
submitted,
Waste Management appealed the denial of the
operating
permit for Trench II on May
25 in PCB 84-61.
About April
30,
the
Agency denied supplemental permits for certain waste streams at
ESL,
claiming,
in part,
the same
lack of monitoring data
required
by the permit appealed in PCB 84-45.
Waste Management appealed
denial of the supplemental waste stream permits on June 4,
in
PCB
84—68.
Thus,
the controversial April
12 meeting between the Agency
and the Attorney General~soffice took place after the permit
appeal in PCB 84-45 had been filed but before the Agency made the
permit decisions in PCB 84~6land 84—68.
~o
further complicate
this matter, part of the Agency~sreasons for denial
of
the
permits appealed in 84-61 and 84-68 was the claimed failure to
submit monitoring required by the permit appealed ~n 84-45.
To
the extent that the majority order attempts to separate
matters
pertaining to 84-45 from the ~‘facts~in 84—61 and 84—68,
it
forces the hearing officer to unravel the Gordian knot,
The issue before the
Board
today
is one of
discovery and it
is
presented with little factual specificity.
It
is
likely the
Board will again face this issue when,
at hearing,
attempts are
made
to introduce the products of this discovery into
evidence.
The
Agency has asserted that post-decisional
discussions
between
attorney and client merit a privilege of
non-disclosure.
Waste Management
has extensively argued that
pre—decisional
communications may not be confidential.
Neither party
has argued
the facts of this case:
one communication that was both
pre-
decision and post—decision.
~ich
legal principle prevails?
Hopefully,
final briefs will provide the Board some guidance
in
choosing between the rock and the hard place.
I, Dorothy M.
Gunn,
Clerk of the Illinois Pollution
Control
Board,
hereby certify that the above Concurring Statement
was
submitted
on the
/~~-/t1J~day of
~
1984.
L
‘
~rk
Illinois Pollution Control
Board
Board Member
59~34O