"I thought it was highly unusual," says Sherman, who stands by her findings. "And it spoke volumes about his intentions and his concerns about this story. Instead of telling the public what's going on, he spent most of the letter bashing a reporter." In her view, "This is a classic case of shooting the messenger."
Benevento, for his part, believes Sherman's offering was "slanted, irresponsible and basically deceitful to the public," and while he characterizes his October 19 get-together with Cornetta, Sherman and other Channel 9 personnel as "productive," he sees no reason to remove the letter from the department site. Indeed, he's thinking about posting more online material, some of which might juxtapose the alleged dangers of the Mines soil with CDPHE's worrisome 2004 analysis of health concerns related to a Lookout Mountain antenna farm, where Channel 9 and other stations have been fighting for years to build an enormous broadcasting tower. "If I would have handled the study we did on the TV towers the way 9News has handled this story, I think Channel 9 would have been very upset," he says.
Sherman's October 11 package focused on more than 450 bags of radioactive soil sitting in a fenced area adjacent to soccer fields on the School of Mines' Golden campus. An internal CDPHE memo sent in July to Benevento, environmental programs director Howard Roitman and associate Gary Baughman pointed out that a risk assessment performed by a Mines contractor determined that the bags "can be safely disposed at the BFI Foothills municipal solid waste landfill north of Golden." The memo's authors didn't dispute this contention, but they recommended that the soil be sent to "the CSI industrial waste landfill in Bennett," a town on the plains east of Denver, due to assorted bureaucratic and geological factors. For instance, they wrote, the CSI site "is located within an area of bedrock shale with little or no groundwater," whereas the Foothills facility "is located directly over a groundwater recharge area for groundwater used for drinking water supplies in the Metro area." Although shipping the bags to Bennett would cost $150,000, versus $35,000 at Foothills, they maintained that to do otherwise would establish "a precedent that neither we, nor the communities across Colorado, would wish to set." This argument didn't persuade Benevento, however, and he approved the transport of the bags to Foothills -- a ruling that hadn't been made public prior to Channel 9's exposé.
According to Benevento, a former staffer for Senator Wayne Allard who was appointed to his current position by Governor Bill Owens, Sherman's report was rife with errors. But when he's asked for specifics, he cites only one: the use of the word "dump" to refer to the Foothills landfill. "In federal regulations, a Œdump' is legally defined as an unlicensed, completely unregulated, basically illegal facility," he says. Sherman and company counter that "dump" is common vernacular for a landfill, but they changed the word in the website version of the story anyhow. They also tweaked a reference to Foothills' setting -- it has a Golden mailing address, but isn't technically within Golden city limits -- and added a reference to "other minerals" in a section noting that the contaminated soil was left over from seven-plus decades of experiments with radioactive ores.
It's debatable whether these alterations actually qualify as corrections. In truth, they're semantic massages intended to placate aggrieved parties, and they didn't work in regard to Benevento, since he was just as distressed by matters of tone. He feels that mentions of "cancer-causing material" and "nuclear waste" vastly overstated the soil's dangers. He's just as displeased that Sherman's salvo excluded memo passages that downplayed hazards. The statement that dropping bags at Foothills "would not pose unacceptable risks" was as important to his decision as the prospect of saving $115,000, he says, adding, "If I'm not going to buy additional environmental protection, I'm not going to spend state dollars for no reason."
Granted, Benevento passed up the opportunity to share this opinion with Channel 9; he shrugged off numerous interview requests, leaving Roitman to comment for the department. Opposing him onscreen was environmental activist Adrienne Anderson, a controversial former University of Colorado professor who believes Benevento tried to get her fired at CU. Anderson describes Benevento's public letter to Channel 9 as "yet another attempt to intimidate people into silence, and I think it warrants a serious investigation by the Colorado Legislature as to why Governor Owens appears to support this sort of bullying behavior." In response, Benevento declares that Anderson "may very well be the most objective person they could find to talk about this, and that tells you everything you need to know about the story."
Equally telling is Benevento's admission that his testy Channel 9 critique wasn't the first letter to a media boss he's placed on the CDPHE website. Last December, he put up a screed addressed to Denver Post editor Greg Moore after the publication of "Water Protection Adrift," a piece by scribes Miles Moffeit and Theo Stein, and he left it online for months. "I'd get comments from other people in the newsroom about it still being there," Moffeit recalls. "It really surprised me he kept it up for so long." Benevento subsequently demanded, and got, a sit-down with the Post editorial board, and in January, the paper published a second letter, in which he attacked the article in vague terms and defended his department. Nevertheless, the Post refused to apologize for anything in its article, which appeared mere months prior to the resignation of water quality control division head Mark Pifher, and Channel 9 isn't backpedaling, either. News director Patti Dennis, who was among the attendees at the October 19 summit with Benevento, characterizes Sherman's effort as "accurate and fair," and confirms that no retraction is forthcoming.
Meanwhile, Benevento is ruminating about other things he can tack on to the growing Channel 9 section of the CDHPE website -- maybe even a link to the website of Canyon Area Residents for the Environment, a Lookout Mountain-area group promoting the theory that broadcast radiation causes cancer. "I would think that the radiation from Lookout Mountain would be significantly higher than the lightly contaminated soil from the School of Mines," he asserts. "But 9News isn't investigating that."
Access denied again: In early September, the Denver City Council voted to stop financially supporting Denver Community Television, the organization charged with running the area's public-access channels. Approximately six weeks later, on October 18, Boulder councilwoman Robin Bohannan went her Denver peers one better. She offered a so-called "friendly amendment" to halt payments to Community Access Television, which oversees Channel 54, Boulder's access provider, as of December 31. The proposal, which provided for equipment to be mothballed for as long as two years, passed 6-2, effectively killing Channel 54.
CATV executive director Andrew Bergey, still reeling from what he calls "being laid off in public," confirms that if Channel 54 remains dark for an extended span, Comcast, Boulder's cable service, can contractually demand its return without compensating the city. Right now, the council is soliciting ideas, and those floated so far include using the gear for an Internet service or simply selling it off before its value vanishes. As for producers, Bergey says, "They're still processing everything, but they're upset that this time, it's for sure."
Clearly, public-access TV isn't a growth industry.