JEFFERSON CITY – Jay Nixon today joined Claire McCaskill as a statewide Democrat with deep conflict of interest problems. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch revealed that Nixon has been sitting on a family pollution scandal for well more than a decade.

As the story spread statewide, Nixon abandoned his predictable attempt to say nothing and run away. Contacted by the Associated Press, a Nixon spokesman claimed that the Attorney General had a solid environmental record, but failed to address in any fashion the mystery of how his own family has escaped litigation and enforcement since 1991 when his primary opponent Michael Wolff—now Chief Justice of the Missouri Supreme Court—blew the whistle on the Nixon family mess in Jefferson County.

According to the new Post-Dispatch story, Nixon’s father is the “director of the small utility” known as Central Jefferson County Utility Company.¹ The company is supposed to service one of the largest residential subdivisions in Jefferson County. However, in recent months the company has become the focus of state and federal environmental regulators who have gone so far as to report the plant’s lack of compliance “one of the worst in the state.”² Earlier this month, the Environmental Protection Agency ordered the company to “immediately correct, significant long-standing violations of the Clean Water Act” that included “illegal sludge discharges” and “environmental harm”. In addition, the EPA ordered the company to “clean up the sewage that it has illegally discharged into [nearby] Gallagher Creek”.³

Nixon’s ties to the polluting plant go beyond his father’s alleged failure to abide by state and federal pollution standards. In the 1992 primary campaign for Attorney General, Wolff revealed that Nixon had worked for the operating company of the sewage treatment plant, in addition to accepting over $30,000 in affiliated corporate donations.⁴ Now, over a decade later, Nixon has been forced to outsource his office’s duty to litigate his father’s company in a pending lawsuit against the plant.

“Jay Nixon has been Attorney General for well over a decade, during which time his own family’s alleged violations of state and federal water quality standards have gone untouched. Missourians have a right to know why this happened,” said Missouri Republican Party spokesman John Hancock. “This self-named ‘environmental candidate’ sues taxpayers over a derelict bridge in order to impress the Sierra Club, but he apparently can’t ask his own father and former employer to stop dumping toxic sludge into the waterways that belong to the hardworking families of Jefferson County and our entire state.”

Adding insult to injury, the victimized families in Jefferson County could be forced to pay much steeper bills to clean up the festering mess that Jay Nixon did nothing about for as long as possible. Just last week, a local design engineer said that the cost to remedy the situation could be forced into the bills of local taxpayers.⁵

¹ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 12, 2005
² News Democrat Journal, December 7, 2005
³ EPA, Press Release, December 1, 2005
⁴ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 4, 1991
⁵ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 12, 2005