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Gerhard's spiel improves neither with age or overuse. He employs the same tired old tricks and ploys and it is never on behalf of himself but always at the behest of another - in Root it was a Mr. Roth, of Rochester and Florida, who pleaded nolo contendre to a federal indictment for price-fixing in garbage hauling, and here on behalf of Casella, whose business practices occupy many multiple file cabinets full of investigations and charges in the Attorney General's Office.
I have yet to discover, even after all these years, exactly what Gerhard/ALCEN stands for, but the last corporate check that I did with Dept. of State showed only that the corporation was housed at Gerhard's home address ( spare bedroom business?) and that he and his wife were the only stockholders of record. Gerhard is obviously supposed to get the agreement with a sucker town, turn it over to his employer and then depart.
He can promise what he wants but I can assure you that he will not be around to fulfill those promises. As in Root, he only seems to want to go public when he has landowner agreements, I would guess that the Brant option-buying was also conducted in all secrecy. Why, if he was truly willing to put forth his "opportunity" did he not query the town beforehand?
Gerhard insisted that Root, obviously like Brant, was just chock full of people absolutely demanding a landfill but were simply too intimidated by loud and dangerous enviros to make their feelings known in public. The dumpers founded a "citizens advisory committee" (pure Cerrell) who were carefully instructed to never say that they wanted a landfill but just say they "wanted all the facts" and "wanted to keep an open mind".
The "committee" -all five of them-met weekly at Gerhard's Root office.
Mohawk Environmental also made grandiose-sounding promises to pay Town taxes (a pittance) but that and the rest of the so-called host benefits were very much contingent on a specific formula predicated upon maximum landfill operation. It would have been years before the Town saw a penny, if then.
Gerhard assured everyone that property values would skyrocket presumably because landfills attract only the very cream of society to live near them, but in the unlikely event that someone felt that their home value decreased then the dump would make it right. Considering that their making it right consisted of a convoluted formula incorporating the home's assessed valuation and a real estate appraisal (by a dump-appointed real estate firm) so I guess you can imagine that few homeowners were not going to substantiate their entitlement to damages under that scenario. Nevertheless, Gerhard promised firetrucks, playgrounds, senior citizen's centers, and whatever strings of wampum he could offer to Root residents to buy at a pittance their town's irreplaceable land.
I have seen a few of Gerhard's option agreements and was struck by the fact that he was acquiring the land for practically nothing while Roth (and the ones who who he fronted for) stood to make stratospheric profit.
Mohawk Environmental sued the Town of Root because they were outraged that we would resist their generous offer and dared to stand in their way by making decisions like passing laws which they felt were contrary to their business interests.
They said they were sueing Root merely to defend themselves. Nazi
Germany, as I recall, invaded Poland for exactly the same stated reason.