I wanted to get this posted.
It’s been moving slowly as I’ve been under the weather lately. This came in on 12/31/2014. Great way to end the year.
We need the followers of the
page to seriously read the material that is being posted here. These GSA materials
are going to be particularly important as they are the last of the four
agencies I FOIA’d for information to respond. (EPA and Coast Guard made token
releases and there are outstanding appeals for those releases.) The final
appeal to MARAD went out Friday and was accepted Monday. More on that, later.
It’s been 14 months and 10
days since I submitted the FOIA to GSA and this is all we have so far. This is
the FOIA that they wanted to charge me over $10,000 to fulfill. So far we only
have a few hundred pages. For that price, there should be over 5,000 pages of
documents. Of course, that would have required someone to be paid over $9,000
to review them for release. What rot. They are releasing this information only
because investigative reporter Danielle Ivory of the New York Times requested
the same information. I am only being courtesy copied on the release.
Nevertheless, there are
answers as to how STORIS was allowed to be destroyed in these pages. There is
also ample proof of the arrogance, ignorance, incompetence and deceit within
GSA (and within the federal government as a whole).
Please read and share.
With that said, this is the
second GSA release related to STORIS.
The 10-page document as
Document 1 is nothing but a highlighted printout from the GSA Web site –
already public – and they were most likely going to charge me a bundle for it.
The second document is 273-pages
long and has proven to be a disturbing read.
First of all, GSA claimed in
its response with the first release that it had no information related to the
Certificate of Financial Responsibility, yet there are several email exchanges
within this packet that discuss Mark Jurisich of U.S. Metals Recovery working
to get the necessary insurance for the COFR. Someone else asks what COFR stands
for. How can GSA sell ships if they don’t know what the legal requirements are
and the necessary documentation?
Some additional highlights:
P 22 – The correspondence identifies
STORIS as being destined for scrapping on June 28, the day the ship was
awarded. They KNEW she was going to be cut up. It also brings up the MOA with
AK SHPO and USCG, explaining that the responsibility is in preserving the
ship’s history, which is the Coast Guard’s problem, not GSA, so they can get
rid of the ship herself.
This is discussed in a
message from Heather Bischoff, the GSA property manager who coordinated the
sale:
“Another important piece of
information for you to be aware of is the high bidder will be using the vessel
as scrap metal. The MOA with the State Historic Preservation Office and Coast
Guard (attached) put the onus on the Coast Guard to preserve the history rather
than putting restrictive covenants on the vessel itself.
HB”
Just because they could dump
the ship, doesn’t mean it was the right thing to do.
Just like there was no
restriction listed in the GSA auction listing for the ship that recycling would
be restricted to U.S. facilities, there is also nothing mentioned in the document about the
federal laws that we have discussed that should have prevented this debacle
from happening.
40 USC 548 should have
mandated that STORIS’ disposal be handled through the U.S. Maritime
Administration, NOT GSA, because her tonnage exceeded 1,500 tons displacement.
Section 3502 of the Duncan
Hunter National Defense Authorization Act dictates that all retired U.S.
Government vessels must be recycled in U.S. ship recycling facilities. No foreign scrapping of
these vessels is permitted. Yet STORIS was cut up on the beach in Ensenada, Mexico. Foreign scrapping was the only way that the buyer
could have made any kind of profit in scrapping STORIS, as her size made
domestic scrapping cost-prohibitive. It shouldn’t have been possible for her to
be exported to Ensenada, but the government allowed it to happen.
P 27 – There is discussion
about the Museum donation process and reserve price issues. Since the ship was
considered surplus, GSA apparently set a reserve price to encourage bids but
officials were also apparently ready to accept any price. In fact, GSA
officials started exchanging emails just after the auction was completed
indicating that they were going to accept the bid, even though it did not meet
reserve.
GSA refused to donate the
ship, but at the same time, if we knew that they were going to allow her sale
for such a low amount, we could have put together the necessary funding to
purchase the ship ourselves.
It would have been in the
best interests of the ship.
The MOA used by GSA to
dispose of STORIS without consideration for her history was created through
Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. However, I also
believe that the language of Section 110 of that same legislation should have
created a strong incentive for the government to put the ship’s preservation as
a top priority, especially since she had recently been officially listed as
nationally significant on the National Register of Historic Places. This is
discussed in the document related to the Nauticus Conference Sept. 25. The
document is here: http://goo.gl/PKmKa2.
There is also snarky
discussion about Jim Loback and STORIS Museum.
Reading through these
materials, GSA claims (correctly) that no other federal or state agency claimed
the ship when they had the opportunity. They also claim that no one asked for
the ship as a donation. We know that to be patently false, considering Jim
Loback had been talking with GSA and Coast Guard officials about saving STORIS
for weeks with GSA and YEARS with the Coast Guard. GSA describes their refusal
to deal with the STORIS Museum for donation purposes because the organization
didn’t qualify under their rules as a “real museum.” That required having
full-time professional staff and a building for a certain amount of time.
GSA officials blame Jim
Loback, as “that guy” who didn’t do what he said he was going to do. Jim spoke
with GSA and other government officials on more than one occasion explaining the
situation: GSA officials were obviously ignorant or refused to accept the
reality that STORIS was the building for the proposed museum. How can you
establish a museum vessel if you don’t have the ship? And without a clear shot
at obtaining title to the vessel, fundraising was extremely difficult.
At one point, before GSA was
apparently aware of the MOA between AK SHPO and USCG, Jim was told that the
ship could be transferred at low cost with a waiver. I believe it was Heather
Bischoff who told Jim that they had created such waivers in the past and STORIS Museum would be able to be part of the process in writing protective covenants
for the ship. Jim was told there was a high certainty, above 99 percent, that
we would get the ship. Once GSA found the MOA, all that was immediately dropped
and GSA worked to get rid of the ship ASAP, again with no concern for her
physical integrity and national level of historic designation. Whether that was
documented is unknown, but it hasn’t shown up yet in any paperwork. If such
paperwork or correspondence exists, I doubt GSA will let it see the light of
day. But I know what Jim was told.
I have also been told by Jim
Loback and another credible source that GSA offered the ship directly to the
State of Alaska as a donation and Alaska officials turned down the offer. Again, the veracity
of this I have no doubts about. It’s whether or not the government will admit
to anything or keep paperwork hidden.
I resent referral to Jim
Loback as “that guy” and the tone taken. Jim put a lot of work into the effort
to save STORIS and is a veteran of multiple branches of the armed services. It
says a lot about the GSA bureaucrats to speak in such a disrespectful, cavalier
fashion about someone so dedicated to preserving a legendary icon of U.S.
Maritime Heritage.
GSA refused to make an
exception to their plans to sell the ship by reopening the donation period to
allow the U.S. Navy Sea Cadets to claim the vessel through the public benefit
provisions of federal law, as they are registered recipients of GSA surplus.
However, GSA allowed the buyer exceptions with his lengthy noncompliance in
removing the ship from the SBRF and last-minute provision of a Certificate of
Financial Responsibility for insurance coverage related to pollution prevention.
Also on pg 27, the June 28, 2013 email from Dave Robbins, Director of Office of
Personal Property, states that it is not in the best interest of the government
to force the Coast Guard to pay to dispose of the vessel. Apparently GSA doesn't appear to know that domestic
ship recycling companies would pay the government to dispose of the vessel.
Again, if we had known they were going to sell the ship for $70,100, we could
have put that money together.
It still remains to be seen
what will happen to STORIS’ CG neighbors in the SBRF, the former USCGC
PLANETREE (WLB-307) and USCGC IRIS (WLB-395), two 180-foot Seagoing Buoy
Tenders. The two WWII-build WLBs are ironically designated as unsellable
because they contain levels of asbestos and PCBs above government regulated
levels. They were built after STORIS. It is likely, and has already been
acknowledged with a MOA between MARAD and the CG, that the government will have
to pay to have the two buoy tenders scrapped because of the associated
regulations for the haz-mat and their small size. They are not 600-foot tankers
that displace 12,000 tons…
GSA insisted that it was in
the best interests of the government to accept the offer, but it obviously
wasn’t in the best interests of the ship. And in the long run, the $70,100 that
the government took in for STORIS certainly would have been exponentially
eclipsed by the economic and cultural benefits of preserving the ship as a
living history museum vessel and training ship for the U.S. Navy Sea Cadets.
But the bureaucrats can’t see that.
GSA incorrectly states that
the second bid for STORIS was submitted by the STORIS Museum. While the Museum was a registered bidder, we did not bid as we had a
poor cell phone connection with the financial backer, who was out of the
country on a business trip in the Caribbean. Secondly,
as the bidding clearly had not reached the reserve price, according to the
rules posted on the GSA Web site, the assumption would be that the ship would
not be sold and would be relisted with a lower or no reserve. GSA pulled the
wild card also published on their site that they basically could do whatever
they wanted in accepting bids, as highlighted in Document 1.
The communication stream
repeats over and over again for dozens of pages, with little new added
information.
Around page 180, Tonya
Dillard, the sales official directly responsible for STORIS sale, sends the
following message:
“From: Tonya Dillard - 4QSCA
<tonyar.dillard@gsa.gov>
To: Mike Wyckoff - QSCB
<michael.wyckoff@gsa.gov>
CC: Deone Mcmillan
<deone.mcmillan@gsa.gov>
You're welcome We have been
dealing with these individuals submitting inquiries for a while. I will not be
voiding the sale. The successful bidder has paid for the vessel and he had to
get insurance to get the COFR documentation. The successful bidder has invested
a lot of money into getting the vessel removed.”
Who made the request to void
the sale? And where is the proof that money had been spent to move the ship.
The COFR wasn’t issued until literally just before the ship was moved. We’ve
already seen that MARAD was not happy with the delays in removing STORIS from
the Reserve Fleet, and we already had heard from reliable contacts on the West
Coast that the buyer was trying to make arrangements to make the ship
“disappear into a hole” somewhere in the Bay Area to be scrapped using hired
migrant workers in a wholly illegal process.
Again, the document repeats
over and over again, with several inches of white space between paragraphs and
an occasional blank page. No wonder they claim that it will take 5,000 pages to
fulfill the request. What waste, but it’s the government.
Around pg 239, the KMXT
radio story surfaces where I was interviewed Oct. 28 about the ship containing
PCBs and having been illegally exported based on our suspicions that the ship
contained illegal amounts of the toxic substances to have been allowed to leave
the country. There is never an answer presented as to what GSA’s position was
related to the allegations of PCBs on board the ship. Presumably they will fall
back on the flawed paperwork from the Coast Guard that states the ship was free
of regulated PCBs. Of course, we know that there was a significant quantity of
undocumented old wiring and cable on board the ship that likely contained PCBs
above regulated levels, plus any original paints with PCB flame retardants on
the interior of the ship that were buried under years of subsequent layers.
And the rest is repetitive,
once again.
Overall, the correspondence
with GSA is reaffirming that the bureaucrats at that agency, particularly
Heather Bischoff and Tonya Dillard, bear direct and heavy responsibility for
the sequence of events related to the destruction of STORIS. This, enabled by a
government culture of incompetence within their management structure and the federal
government as a whole.
The next GSA release is
supposedly to come out sometime in February.
