Suit seeks Navy info on Treasure Island
In a battle over transparency and the fate of a $5 billion redevelopment project, an environmental watchdog group is suing the U.S. Navy for withholding information about radioactive substances on Treasure Island.
The 400-acre island — a contaminated former naval base — is already home to 1,800 people. Two years ago, the city broke ground on a massive real estate effort that aims to fill the island with 24,000 residents by 2035.
The lawsuit, filed Tuesday by the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility in Washington, D.C., seeks records on cleanup projects at Treasure Island.
PEER, a watchdog group that acts on tips from government workers, says in its complaint that the group submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Navy on Nov. 1, but the Navy hasn’t released any documents or a time frame for when they may be provided.
The FOIA law requires government agencies to tell requesters within 20 working days if they will release records. Ac-
cording to PEER’s lawsuit, the Navy has delayed for months, stalling the release of records and flouting its duty under federal law.
Specifically, PEER wants to know about work performed at Treasure Island by Tetra Tech EC, a subsidiary of the government contracting giant Tetra Tech Inc. The company has been accused of extensive fraud in the cleanup of another tainted San Francisco naval base, the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. Tetra Tech has denied any wrongdoing at the shipyard, blaming any problems on a “cabal” of rogue employees.
But a federal and state review of the company’s test results stretching back to 2006 found “a widespread pattern of practices that appear to show deliberate falsification” or failure to properly perform the work, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of Justice is now suing Tetra Tech EC for fraud.
The company was hired to perform similar radiation-testing projects at Treasure Island. Those projects have attracted far less scrutiny, and PEER has been trying to obtain details about them.
“This is information that the Navy should be posting publicly, we shouldn’t have to make a federal case about it,” the group’s executive director, Jeff Ruch, said Tuesday. “It is not like this is some obscure, abandoned mine. The shipyard and Treasure Island are in the middle of one of the most populated areas in the country.”
The Navy did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In a Dec. 17 letter to PEER, the Navy said the group would have to keep waiting, partly “because of the need to search for, collect, and examine a substantial number of responsive records.”
On Tuesday, The Chronicle reported that corporate managers accused of directing the fraud in the shipyard cleanup led similar projects at Treasure Island, and that public officials have apparently never rechecked that work.
The company’s radiological projects at Treasure Island, which occurred in 2007, 2008, 2013 and 2014, were less extensive than at the shipyard. However, three Tetra Tech EC managers who supervised radiation tests at Hunters Point were involved with similar tests at Treasure Island, Navy records show. Another corporate manager involved with shipyard projects appeared to transmit three reports about Treasure Island to the Navy.
In addition, a former Tetra Tech EC cleanup supervisor who admitted to faking soil tests at the shipyard appears to have performed radiation surveys of three buildings at Treasure Island while working for a subcontractor.
Sam Singer, a spokesman for Tetra Tech EC, has said that the Department of Justice has not questioned the company’s work at Treasure Island.
But Supervisor Matt Haney, who represents the district that includes Treasure Island, called the involvement of Tetra Tech EC there “very concerning.”
“We need to do everything possible to review their work, and to retest if necessary, and not rely on individuals who have been convicted or accused of fraud,” Haney said on Tuesday. In coming weeks he will meet with Treasure Island residents to figure out “what level of added information, or scrutiny is needed.”
In response to questions about whether Tetra Tech’s work had been reviewed at Treasure Island following investigations of fraud at the shipyard, the Navy and the city agency overseeing the island said that a review was unnecessary because any problems would have been caught at the time, during the normal regulatory process.
However, that same process failed badly at Hunters Point, said Bradley Angel, president of Greenaction for Health & Environmental Justice, a local environmental group.
The concern at Treasure Island, Angel said, is that “lowincome people of color in subsidized housing live feet from and likely on top of radioactive and toxic waste that was supposedly declared safe. Tetra Tech was doing work there. Nobody was minding the store.”
PEER’s Ruch also has questioned the ability of any of the oversight agencies to have caught potential problems with Tetra Tech’s work on Treasure Island given what was initially missed at the shipyard.
“There is a lot that is not known publicly about the cleanup at Treasure Island, even as it is being transferred to San Francisco,” Ruch said. “What is the Navy’s problem today will become the city’s problem tomorrow in terms of actual ownership.”
In its Nov. 1 FOIA request, PEER asked the Navy for a range of documents and communications about the scope of Tetra Tech’s radiological cleanup work at Treasure Island and any reviews of that work for signs of possible fraud.
The Chronicle also has struggled to obtain public records from the Navy related to Bay Area cleanup projects. The newspaper filed two FOIA requests in August, asking for records about the Navy’s oversight of radiological testing projects, but had received no response as of January.
“These Requests have apparently been ignored,” a lawyer for the Hearst Corp., which owns The Chronicle, wrote to the Navy on Jan. 14 on the newspaper’s behalf. “Your office has failed to satisfy its statutory and regulatory obligations under FOIA regarding the processing of these Requests.”
Ten days later, a Navy official sent an email to The Chronicle, describing the cases as “extremely complex” and citing “unusual circumstances” for extending the response deadline.
“At present, a reliable timeframe for a response remains undetermined,” the official wrote.
The Chronicle then filed an appeal with the Navy’s Office of General Counsel, which is pending.