Oklahoma City Federal Judge Stephen Friot has signed off on the settlement we told you about a few weeks ago involving Continental Carbon Co. in Ponca City and the Ponca Indian tribe.
The settlement means Continental Carbon will get more times to install pollution controls on its plant in Ponca City. The changes were made to a 2015 consent decree even though the Ponca Tribe opposed the amendments.
The Department of Justice filed the amendment last December and last week’s final approval by the judge angered tribal members.
“I’m dumbfounded,” Casey Camp-Horinek, a council member of the Ponca Tribe of Indians in north-central Oklahoma. “This is just another defilement beyond my comprehension.”
Continental Carbon manufactures carbon black which is used to reinforce tires. Nearly ten years ago, the Houston, Texas-based company paid $10.5 million settling a class action lawsuit filed by the Ponca tribe and landowners. The suit blamed the company for “black dust” in the atmosphere around the plant.
As a result of the settlement, the company agreed to install controls to reduce the “black dust” or soot-forming emissions. But now the new agreement will give the firm another two and a half years to meet the terms of the original settlement.
The amendment was proposed last year by the Trump administration in a package agreement with Continental Carbon and four other manufacturers of the carbon black. Another of the companies, Cabot Corp. of Boston also is getting more time to meet the terms of the settlement it made five years ago with the Environmental Protection Agency.
But in the Ponca City case, neither the EPA nor the DOJ notified the Ponca tribe of the proposed amendment, prompting tribal leaders to say it “marks a woeful shortcoming in the agencies’ responsibilities to the public.”
The tribe followed up with comments after a 30-day period.
“The Poncas never consented to living at the wrong end of a tail pipe,” the tribe said in the comments. “Notably absent in the proposed amendment is any mention of local impacts of the requested postponement — including a complete dearth of information relating [to] the anticipated health impacts,” it added.
E and E News reported that while officials with DOJ and EPA did meet with tribal representatives last month, “effectively, the train had already left the station,” Jason Aamodt, the tribe’s general counsel, said in a separate interview today.
In their Friday motion seeking Friot’s approval of the amendment, DOJ attorneys disagreed that the federal government was under any obligation to formally consult with the Ponca Tribe, adding that the tribe’s comments “do not provide a basis” for rejecting the amendment to the 2015 consent decree.
While Continental Carbon gets more time to comply, “the ultimate requirements to install and operate pollution controls, and to meet stringent SO2, NOx, and PM emission [limits] remained unchanged,” the DOJ attorneys wrote.
Besides still ensuring reductions in plant emissions, the amendment also helps provide “a level playing field compared to settlements in similar enforcement actions in the rest of the carbon black industry,” their filing says.
Both Continental Carbon and Cabot, citing financial hardship