Discussion: Pence Family's Shuttered Gas Stations Left Millions In Cleanup Costs To Public

TPM Article Topics
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By the early 2000s, Kiel Bros. was swimming in debt as industry consolidation and low gas prices stretched profit margins to the brink. The business racked up environmental fines and closed stores. In June 2004, Greg Pence resigned as the company filed for bankruptcy.

2004… low gas prices…

I got my license in 1989. I don’t remember the gas prices in the run-up and opening stages of the Iraq War being “low”. I remember them being damned fucking high. In fact, in 2004, they were 50 cents/gallon higher than they’d been in 1990. And they were trending UPWARD. That’s when Greg Pence declared bankruptcy: when his product was in the middle of an already multi-year price climb! If you look at them in adjusted pricing, the only time they’d been higher than during Greg Pence’s tenure was the early years of the Reagan administration, when the Soviets were in Afghanistan and the Iran-Iraq war was going on (and that in the wake of OPEC intentionally jacking the prices)!

‘Gosh, we’re making more money per gallon every day, but we’re going broke.’ That’s what Pence and Kiel want you to believe they were looking at. How many well-run companies say that?

Soooo… No. No, do not believe the bullshit companies like Kiel want to tell you about ‘low gas prices’ being a problem. Their problem was mismanagement, and it was, and is, incredibly common in the petroleum sector where companies know that even now, they’ve got a sizable captive audience.

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Correction: Trump is a lot more like the typical Republican than some knew.

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And Pence has the gall to wear his so-called Christianity like a cloak. Shameful.

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I’ll bet that based on his track record of ruining everything he touches, Greg Pence went to Trump University.

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Can’t be said enough.

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Well, that and lots of their product (for which they’d surely paid good money) leaking out of their storage tanks and into local groundwater.

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Very typical of businesses to walk away from obligation leaving the taxpayer to clean the mess. After all they got theirs fuck the little guy. And not new at all, my first non family job was at a company that was offered a multi year multi 100 of millions per year deal. The money men said no, they wanted the tax write offs. Eventually they bankrupted the firm and left pensions to a government program.

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This should surprise no one. The fossil fuel industry, with the help of their Republican patrons, have for decades left virtually every piece of real estate their enterprises have touched despoiled, polluted, denuded, contaminated, and poisoned. One need look no further than the abandoned open-pit coal mines in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, and many other places; the abandoned oil fields in California, Texas and Oklahoma; The coal ash pits and spills into our water supplies; and much, much, more.

And now, under the oversight of Trump, Pence and their corrupt minions we have our land and air and water being further raped by the abandonment of proper regulations and penalties intended to force these polluting energy industries to clean up their act.

No, the failure of Pence’s family business to clean up their act should come as no surprise, but should remind all of us of the future that Pence, Trump, and the Republican party are promising for our country and the world.

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Dollars to doughnuts Scott Pruitt is somehow involved…

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“One lemon meringue cream pie…Your pie sir!”

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He used a private email server up until his last day as Governor of Indiana. And the Media let him get away with it. Scott Pruitt too. Sara Palin too. Scott Walker too. Jeb Bush too.

It’s good to live under IOKIYAR!!! And be an inbred ignorant middle brow white asshole.

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AS I read this, I kept thinking that Indiana must be a real hick state when its crooks, like Daniels, the Pences, and friends, are such small-timers. The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter. Failed gas station stores and toxic waste? You can’t be serious!

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I was thinking “chocolate” would be more appropriate :slight_smile:

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No worries. After Trump is finished destroying the EPA, there won’t be anybody to enforce the laws.

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The fact that the company stuck taxpayers with the lion’s share of the cleanup bill rankles some observers, especially in light of the family’s reputation as budget hawks critical of government spending.

Oh they’ve got an easy solution to reconcile that - they think these sites shouldn’t be cleaned up at all.

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An excellent article, which ought to be quite damning for certain IN politicos, and which I had no clue of, but ought to be more surprised about. And I’m sorry for the local residents who’ll, as nearly always, have to deal w/ the health, financial, environmental, and other consequences of these assholes’ greed and selfishness.

One of the things that caught my attention about it, beyond the corruption, is that I have some fairly-minor experience dealing w/ liquid underground storage tanks, sometimes referred to by their catchy acronym (LUSTs) and the regulations governing them–certainly more than the average bear, anyway.

Back in the early- to mid-1990s, the company I used to work for here in OK had dozens of work centers around the state, most of which had private gasoline (and diesel?) tanks for our company fleet vehicles and equipment. I think at least some installations dated to the mid-1970s, post-Arab Oil Embargo (and lines of vehicles waiting for fuel) era, but many others were older than that.

More generally, many existing and former (even abandoned) gasoline stations had similarly used buried steel (nearly always bare (i.e. w/ no protective coating(s)) and w/ no cathodic (low-voltage electrical) protection to prevent corrosion) to ‘satisfy’ their LUSTs. After decades, many were leaking and regulations were put into place to require owners of those tanks to monitor them for leakage, either by simply accounting for the volumes of fuel in and out to keep a running tally–then comparing that w/ a monthly measurement of volume in storage–or via test wells drilled around the area to detect leaking fuel. Obviously, the former was much less expensive, so we and many other entities did that for a while.

As long as the differences between what should be in the tank(s) and what was actually in them were within a small margin of error, the regulations permitted that type of monitoring and the use of those tanks to continue. But once the difference became too great, presumably due to leakage, then the tank needed to be removed or replaced within a certain time frame (6-12 months?) and any new tank(s) installed had to be of a coated and cathodically-protected steel, fiberglass, or other type that would be far less prone to leak.

After a certain time (and I want to think it was 1995), all the tanks w/ the old style of construction had to be either removed or replaced; my company’s response was to remove all of ours and to depend on always being able to purchase fuel at the convenience store down the street (or wherever).

The point of my trip down memory lane (“at long last!” the crowd says…) is that I’d have expected all those leaking tanks, including from Pence’s family’s stations, already would have been dealt with years ago! So it was surprising to me to hear about many of them still being out there and needing attention even today.

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Seems like Pence treated the gas stations like his appearance last year at the Colts game to stick it to the kneelers.
Show up as ordered by his boss looking the part. Then walk out when things get controversial and blame others for the mess. Ask for prayers. Rinse and repeat.

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Motto of this story: Never ever loan money or give credit to anyone named Pence or Trump.

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Shouldn’t this be part of the EPA’s budget cuts?

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Less known is that the state of Indiana — and, to a smaller extent, Kentucky and Illinois — are still on the hook for millions of dollars to clean up more than 85 contaminated sites across the three states, including underground tanks that leaked toxic chemicals into soil, streams and wells.

Why is it less known? If those were gas stations once owned by a family of a Democratic VP, everyone would have been talking a lot about it…

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