By Jeff Blumenthal – Reporter, Philadelphia Business Journal
A longtime lawyer with Gay Chacker & Mittin has been charged with diverting clients from the plaintiff personal injury firm for a decade to outside attorneys in exchange for a cut of their fees.
Neil I. Mittin, 64, of Huntingdon Valley, Pa, was charged Thursday with one count of mail fraud by federal prosecutors in Philadelphia.
He had his name on the door at Gay Chacker & Mittin for 38 years. The firm was co-founded by Edward Chacker, a former chancellor of the Philadelphia Bar Association, and is now called Gay & Chacker.
Prosecutors said between 2008 and 2018, Mittin engaged in a scheme to steal numerous cases from his longtime firm by referring them to outside attorneys. Prosecutors said the impacted clients did not know he was referring the cases, nor did they ask for referrals.
Mittin concealed his actions from his colleagues at the firm by closing the files for those matters and making it appear in the firm’s records that there was no settlement or resolution and that the cases were not viable.
After the fraudulent referrals, prosecutors said the attorneys from the other firms represented those clients and paid Mittin a referral fee of between 33 and 40 percent of the contingency fees plus reimbursement of the costs incurred by Gay & Chacker. That added up to $10.8 million in financial recoveries for the clients and $4.2 million in legal fees and costs that was defrauded from Gay & Chacker.
Wilmington Delaware’s framergy Inc., is one of 21 small businesses sharing $2.3 million in funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to develop technologies that will help protect human health and the environment.
In collaboration with Texas A&M University, framergy will develop a novel water pretreatment system that combines the use of a cutting-edge nanostructured sorbent for effective removal of per- and polyfluoralkyl substances, otherwise known as PFAS. At the heart of the technology is its innovative, chemically stable, metal-organic frameworks.
“Our company’s SBIR-funded titanium metal-organic frameworks have proven to not only capture PFAS in water systems but to break them down into safer substances with the help of the sun,” said framergy’s Chief Operating Officer Ray Ozdemir.
The company is one of 21 small businesses that are receiving Phase I contracts through the Environmental Protection Agency’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program designed to encourage new technologies to monitor air quality, treat drinking water, clean up contaminated sites, and create greener, less toxic materials
The program awards contracts annually through a two-phase competition. Companies compete for a Phase I award of up to $100,000 by submitting research that addresses key environmental issues. After receiving a Phase I award, companies are eligible to compete for a Phase II award of up to $300,000 to further develop and commercialize the technology.
With a bag of trash in hand, Thanh Ha hesitates in front of the two bins, trying to remember into which one her banana peels should go, ‘organic’ or ‘recycling’.
At 68 she never imagined she would have to learn from her 12-year-old grandson how to throw away her trash all over again after her neighborhood recently replaced the traditional trash bin with a new one: a combination of two bins for people to sort.
“My grandson told me I need to throw food wastes into the bin that says ‘organic,’ and plastic bags into one that says ‘recycling.’ Though he has told me that a few times, I still mess up occasionally.”
She has noticed changes in her urban neighborhood near Hanoi, with people exhorting each other to reduce trash. Banners are being set up near elevators to encourage people to reduce the use of plastic bags, and the buses that carry her to the downtown have a question printed on them: “Have you done anything to reduce waste today?”
She said: “I’ve heard that near Hoan Kiem (Sword) Lake there are cameras to record people who litter on streets so that they can be fined. Litterbugs are now criminals.”
The changes in Ha’s neighborhood are also occurring across Vietnam as more and more people sign up for the war against trash.
A motorbike driver rides next to garbage trolleys in Nam Tu Liem District, Hanoi. Photo by VnExpress.
Hanoi in April began a pilot project to record littering offenses using cameras around the iconic Sword Lake. During a three-week trial six people were caught littering and paid total fines of VND13 million ($550).
The Hanoi Urban Environment Company (URENCO), which installed the cameras and monitors them, even wants to shame litterers by publicly displaying their images.
Ho Chi Minh City is also trying to step up its game in dealing with trash. Authorities in the country’s biggest city want all households to segregate organic and inorganic wastes after 2020 and fine those who fail to do so VND15-20 million ($645-860).
The central Thua Thien-Hue Province last month ordered all government offices and agencies not to use disposable bottles, including at conferences, and instead use bottles of more than 20 liters that are easier to recycle. It also wants supermarkets, malls and restaurants to replace disposable plastic with eco-friendly materials by 2020.
The country generates around 70,000 tons of waste daily, more than half in urban areas, with Ho Chi Minh City leading with 8,900 tons followed by Hanoi with 6,500 tons, according to the Vietnam Environment Administration (VEA).
With a lack of efficient treatment facilities, 70 percent of the trash is buried in landfills, many of which are running out of space. People living near them protest against them, saying they have been the sources of odor and toxicity for decades.
Treatng trash has now become an urgent requirement. The government issued an order this year stopping the import of plastic scrap from 2025. Last year the country imported 9.2 million tons, up 14 percent from 2017.
Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc last month exhorted the country to strive for zero disposable plastic use in urban stores, markets and supermarkets by 2021. He ordered the environment ministry to review policies to limit plastic waste and install small-scale plastic recycling plants in industrial zones.
New York State, which last month passed an ambitious law to reduce the emissions that cause climate change, said Thursday that it had reached an agreement for two large offshore wind projects.
The wind projects, to be built off the coast of Long Island, represent a big step forward for a technology that has been slow to take off in the United States because of local opposition and high costs. Experts have said offshore turbines, which are used extensively in Northern Europe, hold great promise because the wind tends to be stronger and more consistent offshore than on land.
Wind farms are a major energy source in the United States, providing about 7 percent of all electricity last year, up from about 2 percent in 2010. But almost all of those turbines are on land. By comparison, Britain expects to get 10 percent of its electricity from offshore wind next year, up from less than 1 percent in 2010.
The New York projects will start operation within the next five years and have the capacity to produce 1,700 megawatts of electricity, accounting for about 20 percent of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s overall goal for offshore wind.
The wind projects, one of which will be 14 miles south of Jones Beach and the other 30 miles north of Montauk, are meant to be an important part of the state’s plan to get 70 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030. The projects will be built by a division of Equinor, the Norwegian oil and gas company, and a joint venture between Orsted, a Danish company, and Eversource Energy, an American firm.
“With this agreement, New York will lead the way in developing the largest source of offshore wind power in the nation,” Mr. Cuomo said. “Today we are true to the New York legacy — to lead the way forward, to govern with vision and intelligence, to set a new standard and to match our words with action.”
Mr. Cuomo also signed a bill on Thursday that the Legislature passed last month requiring New York to eliminate net greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
Developers of offshore wind farms have long struggled to win the support of Americans. Some projects foundered because electricity from offshore turbines generally costs a lot more than power from turbines on land. Politicians and coastal-property owners have also successfully opposed projects that they claimed would obstruct the picturesque views from East Coast shorelines.
Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the liberal Massachusetts Democrat, who died in 2009, famously opposed a proposed offshore wind installation near Cape Cod. Other elected officials, including President Trump, have also objected to wind farms. (Mr. Trump, who once called climate change a “hoax,” unsuccessfully opposed an offshore wind project near one of his golf courses in Scotland.)
Bacteria levels from a harmful algae bloom at Greenwood Lake are as much as 10 times higher than the state health standard, test results show.
Water samples taken Monday from the New Jersey-side of the lake show cyanobacteria levels at 212,000 cells per milliliter, significantly more than the safe threshold of 20,000 cells per milliliter, according to lab results posted by the state Department of Environmental Protection.
That was the highest reading recorded from water samples taken at four sites that has prompted an advisory against swimming or any contact with the water at the lake that spans nine miles from Passaic County into Orange County, New York.
The other results were still well above the state standard, at 61,000 in the northern section of the New Jersey side of the lake, 90,000 in a middle section and 148,000 cells per milliliter at Browns Point, a park on the lake in West Milford.
The lab results show bacteria levels rose this week from samples taken July 10. In one case the numbers doubled
The highest reading at Lake Hopatcong — another major recreational lake under siege by an algae bloom — was 179,000 cells per milliliter taken on June 27 from Mt. Arlington Beach.
On a conference call with reporters Thursday morning, DEP officials said that while the high cell count is concerning, it is hard to compare whether one outbreak is worse than another.
“The numbers are going to rise and fall throughout the event,” said Robert Newby, a DEP microbiologist.
DEP officials said they suspect a combination of heavy rainfall, rising temperatures and climate change contributed to some of North Jersey’s largest lakes being overwhelmed with algae, but said there was no definitive answer as to why it’s happening this summer.
Several lakes in other Northeast states, including New York and Pennsylvania, are being inundated with algae blooms, said Bruce Friedman, DEP’s director of water monitoring standards.
Norway-based Fred.Olsen Windcarrier provided its construction vessel Brave Turn to build the Block Island Wind Farm alongside Montco Offshore liftboats. Deepwater Wind photo
Off the New Jersey coast, the bright red hull of the Fugro Enterprise has become a familiar sight to commercial fishermen who pull shellfish dredges and tend gillnets.
Plodding along at around 4 knots, the 170’x40’x11′ survey vessel is making detailed geotechnical surveys for the Ocean Wind energy project, planned by Ørsted to accommodate towering wind turbines that would supply New Jersey with its first 1,100 megawatts of renewable energy generated by offshore wind.
The CTV Atlantic Pioneer has serviced the Block Island Wind Farm since spring 2016. Blount Boats photo
To New Jersey’s renewable power advocates and Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, the work is a welcome sight. It’s the first step toward building what they hope will be 3,500 MW of offshore power by 2030.
For people in the state’s seafood industry — including the long-established and profitable scallop and surf clam fleets — the big red boat portends a new struggle to stay in business.
“The impact to New Jersey will be devastating if the commercial fishing industry is displaced at all,” warned Brick Wenzel, a captain who fishes out of Point Pleasant Beach, N.J., as state utility regulators prepared measure so Ørsted and other companies could bid for power contracts.
The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) and Coast Guard have put wind developers on notice that they will need to plan for wide, safe vessel traffic lanes through future turbine arrays.
But that’s just one challenge ahead for an industry, born in the waters of northern Europe that now looks to develop potentially the richest wind energy market in the world.
In U.S. waters, offshore wind developers face hurdles of finding enough heavy-lift construction vessels, and even physical space in U.S. ports to accommodate the coming generation of giant wind turbines.
LOTS OF WIND, RIGHT SPOT
The East Coast between southern New England and the Carolinas is so attractive for offshore energy development because it has consistent year-round wind close to “load centers” — Boston, New York and other cities of the eastern megapolis, said James Bennett, who heads BOEM’s renewable energy program.
The pioneer was Deepwater Wind (now part of Ørsted) with its five-turbine, 30-MW Block Island Wind Farm of Rhode Island that went online in 2016. The same year Equinor (then known as Statoil) won a 79,350-acre lease for its Empire Wind project, tucked between shipping lanes into New York Harbor.
Two years later companies bid almost double what Equinor spent per acre to secure three more leases south of Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., for $135 million each in December 2018.
“I think what you’ll see with these leases in place is tremendous acceleration down to Virginia,” said Bennett.
An offshore wind turbine under construction. Siemens photo
With that market signal, U.S. shipbuilders and other would-be suppliers have been stepping up with their offerings. Two major trade shows, the International Partnering Forum 2019 presented by the Business Network forOffshore Wind in New York City in April, and the U.S. Offshore Wind conference in Boston in June, both counted packed houses with around 1,400 attendees each.
In May Ørsted and partner WindServe Marine LLC, an affiliate of New York-based Reinauer Group, announced plans to build a pair of crew transfer vessels (CTVs). The BMT Group-designed catamarans will be the second and third U.S.-flag CTVs since Blount Boats, Warren, R.I., built the CTV Atlantic Pioneer to service the Block Island turbines.
