Blog

Nixon linked to secret E. coli report, refuses to take responsibility

July 29, 2009

JEFFERSON CITY—A review of e-mails and meeting minutes suggests that Governor Jay Nixon was involved in a decision to purposely withhold information from the public about E. coli in the Lake of the Ozarks, according to today’s Springfield News-Leader.

The article reports that Joe Bindbeutel, then-Deputy DNR Director and longtime Nixon confidante, requested the secret E coli data for a meeting in the governor’s office. The minutes of a later meeting between DNR employees and the Lake of the Ozarks Watershed Alliance declare that the tests have “drawn the attention of the Director of DNR as well as Governor Nixon.”

“The evidence continues to mount that Jay Nixon and his top officials knew about dangerous levels of E. coli in the Lake of the Ozarks and deliberately withheld the information from Missourians,” said Lloyd Smith, Executive Director of the Missouri Republican Party. “This was a grave breach of the public trust—yet Jay Nixon has not taken responsibility. We hope that the investigations being conducted by the State Senate and the Attorney General reveal the truth about what Nixon knew and when he knew it.”

From the News-Leader:

• “Nixon’s office says Bindbeutel visited their Capitol office on June 4 for a meeting about energy policy with an industry lobbyist and deputy legislative director Kristy Manning — not water quality or E. coli… But that doesn’t explain why, according to two e-mails, Bindbeutel told a deputy director of DNR’s division of environmental quality that he needed the E. coli report for a meeting in the governor’s office… The e-mail that ties Bindbeutel to a meeting in the governor’s office was sent by a veteran bureaucrat. “Joe said he needed it for the meeting in the Gov. Office tomorrow,” Pabst wrote in a June 3 e-mail to Templeton’s secretary.”

• “Included in the News-Leader’s request for documents were notes from a June 12 meeting between Bindbeutel, Pabst and other DNR employees and members of the Lake of the Ozarks Watershed Alliance , who volunteer to collect water samples for DNR as part of a five-year study of the lake’s health funded by AmerenUE. The minutes offer a hint that the governor’s office may have been made aware of the high levels of E. coli earlier than Nixon or his staff have publicly acknowledged… Bindbeutel is paraphrased as saying, ‘the recent water testing has drawn the attention of the Director of DNR as well as Governor Nixon,’ according to the minutes, which were taken by a LOWA volunteer.”