“You received no calls in advance, or any letters from the EPA?”
“No.”
“Did anyone else in the subdivision or the developers have any trouble before? Did anyone else have to do anything special to develop their home?”
“No. And I know this because of the spec home we built. All our permits sailed right through.”
Joe said, “These three women-were they all from the EPA office in Cheyenne?”
“Two were, they told Butch,” Pam said. “The third one was from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, or so she said.”
“Who were they, exactly? Did they give Butch paperwork or letters from the government?”
Pam shook her head emphatically. “I know the name of one: Shauna Naous. She gave Butch her business card, and I’ve talked to her since. Butch can’t remember if the other two gave their names or not. They didn’t give Butch anything at all except Shauna Naous’s business card. Oh, and they said we would be fined seventy thousand dollars a day.” Pam’s voice was deadpan, as if delivering the punch line.
“Say again,” Joe said, assuming he’d not heard correctly.
“Seventy thousand dollars a day,” Pam repeated. “Starting that Monday, until we complied with the order.”
“Your lot was worth. .”
“Sixty thousand,” Pam said.
“Wow,” Joe said.
“That’s what they told him, and then they drove away. If Butch didn’t restore the lot to exactly the way it looked three days before-including the weeds and grass-we would be fined seventy thousand dollars per day. This was after three days of dirt work. As you know, there is no way possible to plant grass and weeds and make it look completely natural on a construction site for months in this country. Even if Butch hauled all the dirt out and bladed the slope back to the same grade it was, it isn’t possible to have grass just magically grow again.”
“Pam,” Joe said firmly, “you’re telling me that three bureaucrats drove all the way north from Cheyenne and showed up without a court order, or a warrant, or anything besides a single business card and told you to stop working on the property you owned or you’d have to pay seventy thousand dollars a day in fines?”
“That’s what I’m telling you, Joe,” she said. “I swear it.”
“This is just like the Sackett case in Idaho.”
Marybeth asked, “The what?” Pam looked up like she didn’t know the case, either, which Joe found surprising.
“The Sacketts,” Joe said. “A married couple building a home in a subdivision near Priest Lake. Out of the blue, EPA folks showed up and told them to stop and didn’t provide any kind of documentation. Told them to restore the land, or they’d get a huge fine every day. The case is working itself through the legal system right now, and my understanding is it’s likely to wind up in the Supreme Court.”
“You’re telling me this happened before?” Pam asked, as if she wasn’t sure whether it was good or bad news.
“Something similar, anyway,” Joe said. “Pam, be honest with me. I saw the lot, but I didn’t study it. Is there any way it’s actually a wetlands area? Is it conceivable Butch was filling in a swamp or a runoff stream that would go into the lake?”
“No, and that’s not all,” Pam said. “When this horrible Naous person finally took my call, I asked her where they had gotten the information that our property was a wetlands. She told me that it was public information and I could look it up on the Internet at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers National Wetlands Inventory database. I was pissed because I thought the developers somehow forgot to check that or something, so I got on the computer and checked it myself. And guess what?”
“What?”
“Our property isn’t listed as a wetlands. I called her to tell her that, and you know what she said?”
She didn’t wait for Joe to ask.
“She said the National Wetlands Inventory database isn’t definitive. She said just because our property isn’t on it doesn’t mean it’s not a wetlands.”
Joe pushed back and stood up. He crossed the kitchen to the pantry and asked, “Anybody else want a bourbon and water?”
“I’ll take one,” Pam said.
“I’ll take one, too,” Marybeth said. “And I don’t even like bourbon.”
Joe placed the three glasses on the table, and Pam sipped hers and made a sour face, but she didn’t push it away.
“So what did Butch say to this Shauna Naous and the other two when they told him to stop working?” Joe asked.
“Nothing,” Pam said, and sighed. “He just clammed up and waited for them to leave. I think he was so stunned by what they told him he just couldn’t speak. His dream was just crashing down all around him and he couldn’t believe what was happening and he just froze up. Boy, I wish I’d have been there. I would have thrown it right back in their faces and told them to get off my property-that they had no right to even be there.”
Joe believed her.
“We’ve never been political,” she said. “I don’t even know if Butch voted in the past ten years. We just don’t follow that stuff, even though I’d say we’re both pretty patriotic and conservative. I’m sure he just couldn’t get a handle on the fact that our government could do such a thing.”
“Twice, apparently,” Joe said, and shook his head. “The more you tell us, the more it sounds like the same exact thing that happened to the Sacketts. I wonder if the same people are behind both cases?” Then: “No,” he said, answering his own question. “We’re in Region Eight and Idaho is in Region Ten of the EPA. So it can’t be the same person, can it?”
He looked to Marybeth, and she nodded crisply. She understood what he was implying.
“I’ll start doing some research tomorrow,” she said to Joe. To Pam: “What happened next?”
Pam took another sip. “After Butch came home with Hannah and told me what happened, he just shook his head and sat in his chair in front of the television with the sound off. Hannah said he was quiet all the way home. I tried to discuss it with him, but he couldn’t even talk about it, he was so depressed. He scared me that night. We’ve got plenty of guns in the house, and that was the first time I ever gathered them all up and hid them in the basement. Not that I thought he’d grab one and go after those women-I thought he might do something to himself. I wanted him to scream and yell and cuss out those women and the EPA, but he just sat there and stared. I didn’t want him to let his emotions get bottled up that way, but that’s how he is.”
Joe asked, “Did Butch do anything with the lot? Did he blade the dirt back?”
“No,” Pam said sadly. “He just walked away that afternoon and never went back. And the next day he went to work like nothing had happened.”
Marybeth shook her head.
“I’m not like Butch, though,” Pam said. “And the next day I was on the phone to this Naous, leaving messages every hour. Either she didn’t want to talk with me or she was out of the office. I called all week. Finally, on that Friday, she called me back at four-fifty p.m. and made it a point to tell me she only had ten minutes to talk.”
“What was she like?” Marybeth asked.
“She just sounded annoyed but tried to act like she wasn’t,” Pam said. “Like I was really imposing on her valuable time. I think if I hadn’t hounded her, she might not have ever called me back.”
She took a breath. “At first,” Pam continued, “the way she explained things to me made me think Butch might have misunderstood her. She said we could clear everything up by getting what she called an after-the-fact permit once the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers did a study and said our lot wasn’t a wetlands. That sounded stupid to me, because no one else had to get an after-the-fact permit, but I wrote it down and thought we shouldn’t have any trouble getting one, since anyone can see there isn’t any water on our property.
“When I asked her where we go to get the study started, she tells me it can’t happen until we request one and the process could take years and hundreds of thousands of dollars-and it’s still not a guarantee that the EPA will agree with it.”