A whistleblower lawsuit alleges a Salinas ag company illegally dumped chemicals into the sewage system.

What if, instead of properly disposing of hazardous chemicals like pesticides, herbicides and fungicides, one just dumped them down the drain?

In a whistleblower lawsuit filed in April 2021 by Joseph Kim and Jesus Ortiz against their former employer, seed company Incotec, that was allegedly happening at the company’s North American facility in Salinas.

Kim started work at the facility in December 2018 as its safety, health, environment and quality adviser and, according to the lawsuit, he soon learned that the company had been illegally dumping its chemical waste down the drain into the municipal sewer system. After raising this issue with his supervisors, the suit alleges, changes were instituted to come into lawful compliance, which included disposing of the waste chemicals into containers that were trucked offsite to a hazardous waste disposal facility.

But things went awry, the lawsuit claims, when a new plant manager, Greg Pojani, came on board around March 2020. Pojani allegedly began pressuring Kim and other employees about the cost of the waste disposal system Kim had set up, and repeatedly asked about dumping the chemicals down the drain, despite being told it was illegal.

In September 2020, Kim and Ortiz filed separate complaints with the state labor commissioner, citing discrimination, harassment and stress related to the matter.

Ortiz, a seed technician who started at Incotec in 2002, was on duty later that month when the waste disposal pump broke, according to the suit. His supervisor then ordered him and other seed technicians to start dumping the chemical waste down the drain or be fired, Ortiz claims.

That same day, Sept. 17, the lawsuit alleges Kim received his first written complaint from Pojani. The next day, Kim was fired.

Ortiz, the lawsuit alleges, was harassed and asked to transfer departments. He quit in October 2020.

Incotec and its parent company Croda, Inc. responded in court papers that they “deny, generally and specifically… each and every allegation contained in the complaint.” Incotec’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment, nor did anyone from Incotec. (Pojani is no longer listed in the company’s directory.)

In a hearing on March 22, Monterey County Superior Court Judge Carrie Panetta ordered the parties to agree on a discovery referee; Incotec’s attorneys argued much of the material sought by plaintiffs is proprietary. Panetta called the requests made by Kim and Ortiz’s attorney, Jonathan LaCour, “voluminous.”

LaCour says he plans to file court papers stating that his clients can’t afford what he estimates would be $20,000 to $30,000 in costs for such a referee. “What the judge is trying to do is help the defendant, and keep this out of the public eye,” LaCour says.

Paul Sciuto, general manager of local wastewater agency Monterey One Water, says if chemicals were disposed of at Incotec into the municipal sewage system, it would end up getting processed at M1W’s treatment facilities. Because of dilution, he says, it wouldn’t so much pose a threat to employees there, but the chemicals could kill the bacteria in M1W’s secondary treatment plant, which utilizes a colony of bacteria to consume biochemicals.