Van Hollen
MADISON, Wis. (Legal Newsline) - Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen announced a settlement on Friday with a Marathon County shoe supply company to resolve allegations of unlawful discharges of pollutant-containing wastewater.
The Stratford-based General Shoe Supplies Limited will pay costs, penalties and attorney fees totaling $122,500 to resolve the allegations. General Shoe allegedly discharged the wastewater on or before, January 15, 2007. The discharges, which contained phosphate and zinc and drained into the municipal sewers leading to the Stratford Publicly Owned Treatment Works, allegedly continued until March 2, 2009.
General Shoe also failed to file reports semi-annually with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources regarding the discharges. The company did not submit the compulsory final compliance report to the DNR until Nov. 28.
Thomas E. Griffith, the operator and vice president of General Shoe, will also pay penalties of $2,500 for failing to submit a baseline monitoring report until October 28. The report was supposed to provide detailed information about the methods General Shoe would use to pre-treat its wastewater and the nature of the company's pollutants.
Griffith and General Shoe cooperated with the DNR and have now brought the facility into compliance. The company was able to achieve this by adding pretreatment control equipment to treat a waste-stream and by recycling another waste-stream.