DeKalb schools may have violated environmental regulations

This is how a simple phone call becomes a crusade.

During the heavy rains in early April, Joe Hirsch said, he watched day after day as mud oozed from a school construction site into a stream near his Dunwoody home. He figured that was a violation, and thought a simple phone call to authorities would get it fixed.

But the recent incorporation of Dunwoody landed him in a bureaucratic thicket. When he called DeKalb County building inspectors he was told the city was now in charge. When he called the city, he was told they had no enforcement power. And when he called the county school system, an official there told him he was witnessing a one-time incident and that everything would be just fine.

Thus began his odyssey. “I never intended to wreak any havoc,” Hirsch said this week. He’d intended to make just one phone call but ended up spending weeks on the project. After an Internet search and numerous calls — to county commissioners, school board members, city council members and even the soil and water district — Hirsch wound up at the state Environmental Protection Division.

Environmental Specialist Kappitola Williams checked out his complaint. She found that the school system’s contractors lacked a construction permit. In an interview this week, she said that she could have issued a stop-work order with a monetary penalty, but that the school system agreed to stop work voluntarily.

Yet work on the site continued, she said. Hirsch alerted her and on Tuesday, Williams visited again. “They evidently just ignored it,” she said of the agreement to stop work. “There were two or three bulldozers moving on the site.”

Williams said she ordered workers off the soil. A meeting between the school system and environmental regulators is scheduled at the site on Womack Road Friday to determine whether sanctions are in order.

The school system contends they’ve done nothing wrong. Chief Operating Officer Pat Pope said Thursday that they had the right permit but it wasn’t displayed properly.

Pope appeared as confused by the bureaucracy as Hirsch. She contended that Friday’s meeting would be between school and city officials because Dunwoody, rather than EPD, is the regulatory authority. “I don’t know that they are going to be there,” she said of the state agency.

But both EPD and Dunwoody confirmed Thursday that the state is in charge until the new city obtains authority to regulate construction. “It’s up to EPD,” Mike Nier, the chief building official in Dunwoody, said of today’s meeting.

Tony Campbell, program manager for EPD’s regional storm water team, said the school system must demonstrate Friday that they have the necessary permits — and that they have followed a 40-page procedural document to ensure mud isn’t leaking from the site.

“I’m hoping they’re going to realize [Friday] is an opportunity for them to demonstrate their compliance status,” Campbell said.