Tentative deal paves way for English Station cleanup

A tentative consent agreement has been reached between the owners of the former English Station power plant in New Haven and two state agencies that will pave the way for the environmental cleanup of the property.

Dennis Schain, a spokesman for the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, and Keith Ainsworth, the New Haven-based attorney who represents the two out-ofstate companies that own the power plant site, confirmed Tuesday that the consent agreement has been sent to a hearing officer to determine whether it should approved. The former power plant, which sits on a 9-acre island in the middle of the Mill River, is owned by Evergreen Power and Asnat Realty.

“There isn’t a specific timeframe that the hearing officer has to act upon this,” Schain said. The hearing officer who will determine whether the consent order can be approved is an employee of DEEP, which along with the Connecticut attorney general’s office, had been a party to the delicate negotiations that produced the tentative agreement.

Ainsworth said the tentative agreement gives UI’s environmental clean-up crews “unfettered access to the site.”

It extracts Evergreen and Asnat from litigation that the state had filed against the power plant’s owners, he said.

“(Furthermore) it specifies that my clients engaged in no wrongdoing as alleged by the DEEP commissioner,” Ainsworth said, referring to DEEP Commissioner Rob Klee.

Evergreen and Asnat will retain control of the property after the environmental cleanup is complete.

Since the start of 2016, Ainsworth and officials with the attorney general’s office had sparred both publicly and privately over the need for such an agreement.

The United Illuminating Co., which had operated the power plant for 63 years before shutting it down in 1992, agreed in September 2015 to pay up to $30 million to clean up the site.

Officials with the utility weren’t immediately available for comment Tuesday. UI is still in the midst of selecting a company to perform an assessment of what work needs to be done and then do the cleanup.

UI agreed to pay for the cleanup even though it had paid Quinnipiac Energy of Killingworth $4.25 million to assume ownership of the former power plant in 2000. UI put an additional $1.9 million in escrow for cleanup in return for Quinnipiac Energy taking control of the property.

UI paid Quinnipiac Energy to take the property off its hands in an attempt to get out from under the costs associated with environmental remediation of the site.