While the Energy Department had reservations about allowing a Washington state employee to act as a court adviser in a recently decided federal case over cleanup deadlines at the Hanford Site, the agency said it has not prevented that adviser’s court-ordered payment.
That is according to a March 16 filing in the U.S. District Court for Eastern Washington, in which DOE said FedEx records show an agency contract for Washington state Ecology Department employee Suzanne Dahl-Crumpler, was delivered for signature on March 1 — well ahead of a court-mandated deadline.
“Accordingly, the United States on behalf of DOE has fulfilled the Court’s March 11, 2016 order “to provide Ms. Dahl-Crumpler with a services contract within ten days [of the date of that order],” DOE wrote in the filing.
Dahl-Crumpler was one of three technical advisers who helped Judge Rosanna Malouf Peterson reach her March 11 ruling updating milestones for Hanford Site cleanup, including ordering DOE to start treating the most contaminated liquid waste at the former plutonium production site by 2036 .
At multiple points in its long-running court case with Washington state, DOE claimed Dahl-Crumpler was ineligible to serve as a technical adviser because of her bias as a state employee, along with provisions of Washington law that barred her from taking what the agency saw as a paid consulting job with the court.
The department most recently raised the issue on March 9, two days before Malouf Peterson released her decision. In an order released along with that decision, Malouf Peterson rejected DOE’s arguments and scolded the agency for wasting time and money by questioning Dahl-Crumpler’s eligibility to serve so late into the judicial process.
Malouf Peterson also ordered DOE to send Dahl-Crumpler her contract, which a letter from the Washington state Attorney General’s Office said she had not received. The letter from Washington state was appended to DOE’s March 9 filing.
According to DOE’s March 16 filing, FedEx records show contracts were delivered to all three technical advisers March 1. At the time of the filing, DOE wrote, only one of these people had signed a contract and returned it to the agency for payment: former DOE official Jeffrey Trent, who is now a senior associate at the Las Vegas-based consulting shop Longenecker & Associates.
