All fields are required
You are the owner and founder of Gorpen Construction. Other contractors have told you that the department is likely to ask you to pay a fine as well as replace the fill, and you are outraged at the prospect. The 5000 cubic yards of fill in question was the cheapest available. Yes, it was from the site of a closed oil refinery, but the seller, now bankrupt, guaranteed that it was clean. You didn't check to see if it was contaminated, and frankly, you didn't think it was your responsibility to do so. In your opinion, the representative of the department at today's meeting, with whom you have had some dealings before, is a nit-picking bureaucrat, out to make a name as a tough regulator at the expense of honest businessmen. You look forward to giving the department representative a piece of your mind on the subject.
You really don't think you should bear the whole cost of the clean-up, but you doubt if you can avoid replacing the fill. Although this will be expensive, you have excavating equipment and trucks still on site, and can save yourself the cost of paying someone for removal and transportation of the fill. You estimate that your cash outlay will be $30,000, which is $6 per cubic yard to excavate and transport the fill to the disposal site.* Buying the replacement fill will cost you about three dollars per cubic yard, or $15,000. Properly disposing of the contaminated fill at an incinerator will entail the greatest expense: about $52 per cubic yard, or about $260,000. Paying a fine on top of costs of this magnitude would be unfair, and also probably impossible for you, even if you are willing to do so.
At present, your cash flow situation is extremely tight. In about six months you will move your equipment to the nearby town of Greenpuddle to begin another major project, and this will in time alleviate the situation. But you have no projects underway, nor are others likely to materialize in the current economic climate. At most, your cash reserves would let you fund the $305,000 cost of clean-up and replacement, and pay a fine of $80,000. Such a fine, though, would leave you without any financial margin whatsoever. If this case ever went to court you doubt the judge would impose any fine at all, let alone one as high as this.
Your position going in to today's negotiation is therefore as follows. Ideally, you would like to get the department's representative to acknowledge that the fill is not your responsibility, and to either allow the fill to remain, or to move it at the Department's expense. If this is not possible, you will agree to remove and properly dispose of the contaminated fill and replace it. At all cost, though, try to get the Department to waive the fine or at least keep it at a nominal level. In your current cash flow situation, this is crucially important.
*In order to keep all figures comparable for this negotiation, prices for transportation and incineration of fill, normally quoted as cost per ton, have been converted to cost per cubic yard.
Your turn — on a separate piece of paper or in a Word processing window, write the positions and interests of the owner of Gorpen Construction. Once you feel you have completed the task, scroll down for the answer key. After you have read the answer and compared it to your work, hit the submit button and send me your work.
