By Julie Manganis
MARBLEHEAD — A federal judge has accepted a plea agreement worked out between the Rockmore Co. and prosecutors who say the business routinely dumped or allowed the overflow of raw sewage into waters along the North Shore for more than 15 years.
The Marblehead-based Rockmore Co., through its president, Peter Noyes, pleaded guilty before Judge Joseph Tauro yesterday afternoon in U.S. District Court to two counts of violating the federal Rivers and Harbors Act, stemming from discharges on two days in August 2006.
Rockmore operates a floating restaurant called the Rockmore in Salem Harbor and a ferry, the Hannah Glover, which hosted dinner and sightseeing cruises along the North Shore. The ferry has also been used to transport children from Marblehead to a summer camp on Children's Island and ran sightseeing tours to the Charles River in Boston during the July Fourth fireworks.
According to the criminal complaint filed last month, which covered a period from 1990 to 2006, prosecutors charged the company with "unwillingness" to pay for pump-out services, and also alleged that the Hannah Glover's sewage tanks were simply not adequate to hold the amount of waste generated during a typical dinner cruise.
The discharges, prosecutors alleged, took place along beaches in Marblehead, Beverly, Salem Harbor and in the Charles River during a 2002 trip, and sometimes involved hundreds of gallons.
Prosecutors also said employees routinely dumped sewage from the Rockmore when holding tanks overflowed.
Yesterday's guilty pleas, however, covered only two specific instances involving the Hannah Glover, on Aug. 12 and Aug. 16, 2006, and the company continues to dispute many of the allegations in the complaint, according to its lawyer.
Within the next 10 days, Rockmore will have to purchase full-page advertisements in The Salem News, the New Bedford Standard-Times and the Cape Cod Times and a half-page ad in the Boston Herald, apologizing for "contaminating the coastal waterways of Massachusetts."
The apology will also spell out exactly what happened: "Our company has discharged human waste directly into coastal Massachusetts waters. For these actions, we have paid a steep fine and have pleaded guilty to criminal charges."
The company has agreed to pay more than $300,000 in fines and costs, including a criminal fine of $225,000 for the two violations the company admitted to, and a community service payment of $75,000 to be paid to the Massachusetts Environmental Trust.
The agreement, reached last month, also calls for the company to spend three years on probation, during which it will be required to maintain detailed records of all sewage disposal and the numbers of customers on board the vessels, start and end times of each trip, and the destination and the names of all crew members. The company will also be required to identify each employee who performs the sewage discharge.
That information must be submitted to the Coast Guard under pains and penalties of perjury with a signed certification by Noyes.
"In pleading guilty today to two misdemeanor charges, the Rockmore Co. Inc. has accepted responsibility for two specific instances from 31�Ñ2 years ago when an employee of the company discharged sewage illegally from the Hannah Glover," Rockmore attorney Peter Ball said in a prepared statement last night. "The company has not admitted to, and in fact disputes, many of the other allegations in the government's charging instrument."
The statement goes on to say that the employee responsible for the discharges on those two days no longer works for the company.
"In any event, by pleading guilty, the Rockmore Co. has put behind it all allegations that it illegally discharged sewage," the statement by Ball says.
"This sentence reflects the government's resolve to prevent our local waters from being used as a convenient dumping ground for those unwilling to pay for proper waste disposal," U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz said in a press release.
The case was investigated by the Coast Guard investigative service and jointly prosecuted by the Coast Guard and the U.S. attorney's office.
