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MINUTES June 1, 2000 3 BOARD OF HEALTH been counting on to do this project and the credit that they got by hooking up Life at Mashpee and providing advanced nitrogen removal for their flows. Let me say at the outset that it seems to us that this is a pretty straightforward situation. We've stated our position in a letter to Mr. Eichner which I hope you got." Mr. Eichner stated that he received the letter that day. Mr. Bliss continued, "I think the Board got copies of it as well. Our letter is consistent with the position of the Board as I understand it as laid out in several of the Board's letters, but most recently their May 9u letter which stated their position. I think basically, if we take a minute to go through the letter, as I say, the positions are clear and are governed by clear legal authority. There really are just two arguments here. One is that in early 1999, when Life got its septic approvals from this Board, the Board at that time simply didn't have the legal authority to require denitrification. That is because, and this is the part that is crystal clear, that Title V regulations themselves state that if a Board wishes to have more stringent requirements, they'd have to do that through what lawyers call the rule-making process, which is notice, public hearing and that whole kind of thing. That was not done in this case, so if when that permit issued, Life was issued just plain vanilla Title V permits and they could go ahead and discharge at that basis. With the upgraded treatment that Talanian has agreed to provide, a lot of nitrogen is going to be taken out of the system. So, our position is that this is precisely the kind of situation that the mechanism is designed to address. The other point is a fairness argument. That is just that if the Commission had a position about this it should have articulated that position a year or more ago when Mr. Talanian spent the money making these plans and not later in the game. The fairness argument is really in addition. The basic argument is that the Board just didn't have the authority to require nitrogen treatment at that point. We think this is pretty clear and we'd like to be able to resolve it tonight and we're clear and we think the Board is clear and we'd like to be able to go away tonight with an agreement as to what is going on." Mr. Eichner stated, "I think Mr. Bliss has sort of laid out where the perspective has been offered by the Talanian folks and, I guess in response I would like to sort of lay out where we are in terms of the regulatory review at the Commission. At the point of the draft environmental impact report the Commission had been proceeding along the lines of providing a standard Title V 35 ppm credit for the Talanian development for hooking up Life at Mashpee. At that point it was brought to our attention during the public hearings, which is part of the process that we go through in terms of these things and gathering public information, so it's not a matter of fairness of us not bringing it up before then, but, in fact it was something that was brought to our attention, that there seemed to be some amount of contradiction in terms of the way previous projects had gone through the Mashpee Board of Health. What sort of information was in the minutes from discussions about Life at Mashpee and the way we had been proceeding with the assumption of a standard Title V system at Life at Mashpee. So, based on a number of those discussions, information that was submitted to us, we had some confusion, admittedly, about which way this was going, what was actually on the books, what had been agreed on, and we've gone around and around in a number of discussions with the Talanian folks about where this stands and what it exactly means. We've had some letters from Elias and what I would like to do tonight would be to get a firm and clear understanding from you folks exactly