Roy Hart has been ordered to pay nearly $1.35 million in restitution for illegally operating a toxic materials storage business in Clearfield's Freeport Center.
At a hearing Monday, U.S. District Judge Dee Benson acknowledged Hart will never pay off all of the money. Payments for the 57-year-old South Dakota man are $200 a month.However, Benson said he wanted the payment to serve as a painful monthly reminder of the losses sustained by some 190 victims who had trusted Hart to dispose of their hazardous wastes.
Hart pleaded guilty in April to one count of illegally disposing of cyanide waste. Three other felony charges, including the violation of the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, were dropped.
Benson also sentenced Hart, owner and president of the now-defunct North American Environmental Inc., to six months of home confinement and three years of probation that will run concurrently with a similar sentence in another state.
Hart will have a specific curfew - he must be home between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. - but he will not be required to wear an electronic monitoring device.
"This has got to hurt," the judge told Hart, after the former waste storage businessman offered to pay $100 a month in restitution.
"You're going to leave here able to go on with your life," added Benson, "but you've got to pay that $200 a month" as a special term of probation.
North American, which operated at the Freeport Center from September 1986 to October 1991, stored and transported for disposal different kinds of toxic wastes, including a suspected cancer-causing agent.
Federal prosecutors charged that when North American failed to obtain the proper operating permits from the government, the company suddenly halted its operations in November 1991.
That left Freeport Center to dispose of hundreds of thousands of pounds of PCB-laden materials stored inside the facility and in unsecured boxcars and rail cars behind the building.
While Hart indicated he had obtained an interim storage permit, he said the EPA rejected his request for a full permit - leaving him without sufficient money to dispose of the hazardous materials.
"I made sure there was no contamination," he told the court, "and that (hazardous materials) were properly packaged during this period."
Despite any precautions, Hart admitted he stored the materials in excess of the one-year time limit allowed in the interim permit.
"You made a lot of companies pay twice to dispose of their wastes," said the judge. "What have you done to make it right with those customers?"
Those victims, according to prosecutors, included Kaysville City, the state of Hawaii, the University of Washington and the Thiokol Corp.