But the condemnation process does not require the state to pay a landowner for a property's potential or the dreams of grandeur harbored by a developer. Just compensation is considered the value of the property at the moment it is appraised. The state's appraisers came onto Gabrielli's land and saw sand and trash, a few buildings worth less than the cost to drag them down. Gabrielli's appraiser, Quinn Hutchinson, saw a special and unique purpose facility" that would be difficult to duplicate. Gabrielli says he didn't want to move, but his business couldn't survive the state's taking of the strip for the Hohokam. He says he needed more space than the partial taking would have allowed him. And if he had to move, the state should factor in the costs of finding a similar site, as well as moving his equipment.
They appraised my land as dirt only," he says bitterly. No buildings, they said they were valueless. I am so sick of listening to this bullshit. To me, it's like building a paper mill. The buildings aren't normal buildings, the receiving docks are not normal receiving docks, the discharge, the water effluence, all that stuff's different-I've got to go out and find a comparable site. In the meantime, I've got no income."
Gene Gabrielli, the green technocrat who made his money off other people's garbage, didn't see any other choice than to take his case to court. So he hired a lawyer to argue that his property was worth more than what the state said it was worth. In Arizona, even if Gabrielli wins, he will have to bear his own legal fees. Under state law, the costs of defending a condemnation suit are not compensable. Gabrielli would have to pay his own lawyers. ²(Foster Mori, Gabrielli's present lawyer, has taken the case on a contingency basis. If the jury in the condemnation trial awards Gabrielli more than the $411,500 offered by the state, Mori will receive a percentage of the award in excess of the offer.)
The state did agree to assist Gabrielli in finding a new location and pay part of the cost of moving his equipment. But he says the state couldn't find a suitable site. And that it has been extremely slow in reimbursing him for moving costs.
My lawyers told me not to say this, but I don't give a shit," Gabrielli says. Those people stretch you. It's beyond the imagination; these people are trying to kill me. They're not taking a gun to my head, they're not stabbing me, but they're running me dry, my family, all my work and everythingÏthis is preposterous."
He says he believes the state will try to settle his case before it goes to trial, but even if he is awarded a figure closer to his estimate of his land's value than the state's estimate, he still may be held liable for the mounting cleanup costs. He could win, and still wind up in debt.
Gabrielli is now bankrupt, though he still has his gray-market Mercedes Benz and is planning a grand opening for the new location of Ecology Companies within a few weeks. He has cashed in his life insurance policy and borrowed money from family members to pay his attorneys. Even before things got complicatedÏbefore the workers broke into that pesticide-filled concrete sump-things were grim.
My wife and I were down to a hundred dollars once-we'd never ever been to that point," he says. I had more money in my pocket when I started in 1973 than I did when they condemned my land."
NOBODY REALLY THINKS Gene Gabrielli is responsible for poisoning the land. As ADOT's Tom Sullivan says, It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that there was a chemical company there, and that's where it came from."
But the state is arguing that, as the landowner, Gabrielli is responsible for cleanup costs. Even though he didn't put the chemicals in the ground, and even though he didn't crack open the sump and let them leak out, he can be held responsible. Even though the state ignored the presence of Olin Mathieson on the land, even though there was no thorough environmental investigation undertaken until after the sump was broken, the state is holding the money it would have paid Gabrielli for the land in escrow, against the cleanup costs.
Of course, ADOT has also been in contact with the chemical company. Though no one at Olin Mathieson would comment because of the litigation swirling around the case, both the state and Gabrielli say the company has been helpful in sorting out the mess.
They've been very cooperative," Sullivan says. They know we've got a problem, and they're willing to work with us. It's in everybody's interest."
I don't have a beef against Olin," Gabrielli says. They did everything they were required to do in 1973, before all these [environmental protection] laws were passed. They rinsed their trucks out there, that's what they hit. [Olin Mathieson's] had people out with video cameras throughout the process-they feel like the state is a secondary generator of the pollution, that when they broke through the concrete they made everything a lot worse."
Sullivan says it's likely that had the sump been discovered before construction began, Olin Mathieson could have surgically removed the toxic waste at a fraction of what the cleanup will eventually cost.
And while Gene Gabrielli argues that he was an innocent purchaser of the land, that he knew nothing about the sump, that he complied with all the environmental regulations he was required to comply with-the law might still hold him liable for some or all of the cleanup costs.
I think the law says that whoever is in possession of the land is responsible for anything that's there, that's how the state of Arizona is holding me liable for this," Gabrielli says. When I bought the land, we knew that there was something underground but we thought it was all dried up. It was just a concrete slab there. We didn't know what this stuff was. We knew that it was a filled-in tank of some sort.
Who would think that I would be such an evil person as to put DDT and DDE in the ground in such high concentrations that they would have to think that I was a garbage dump?" he asks. We were doing our recycling. We were very busy, and planning to expand to state-of-the-art resource-recovery plant. We were doing paper, plastic, glass, aluminum, steel-the only thing we didn't recycle was chemicals. No liquids. We didn't take any liquids at all."
And Gabrielli says he relied on the state's Phase I audit. He thought that gave his property a clean bill of health. I did all this stuff they recommended," he says. They were concerned about some empty drums and containers-these held hydraulic stuff that we used in our trucks and everything; we didn't pour it into the ground. We had an underground storage tank, we put it in there and had a company come along and suck it out. We did what they wanted us to do. We cleaned up all that."
²The ironic thing, Sullivan says, is that if Gabrielli had accepted ADOT's $411,500 offer for the land-$103,500 less than the price he paid-and not forced the condemnation proceedings, then the huge piles of dirt behind the temporary fences wouldn't be Gabrielli's problem. The state would be the current owner and on the hook for the cleanup costs.
Gene was really one of the pioneers with recycling back in the 1970s," Sullivan says. Unfortunately, it goes back on him because he didn't take the state's offer. Had he accepted it, had the state taken possession, he'd be in the clear."
PEOPLE AT ADOT have sympathy for Gene Gabrielli. And Gabrielli sometimes turns philosophical about his predicament. Weeks after he is interviewed, he calls back to say he isn't angry at anybody at ADOT, that there are wonderful people who work there, that the woman who gives him his checks for relocation expenses is always cheerful and glad to see him.
She's glad to see me because she can give me a check," he says. I've got a lot of friends over there, who are just doing their jobs."
But it's made it tough for Gabrielli. He says his ordeal has torn his family apart, and his litany of complaints against the bureaucrats who've swaddled his life in red tape is ever-growing. It has affected him, taken a piece of his soul.
I'm a displaced person," he says. Mentally this whole thing has set me back. I used to be very good at what I do. I have to reorganize my thoughts all the time; it just really put me in a state of mind where it wasn't worth it anymore."
Gabrielli has been working 16-hour days, trying to get his business up and running again. After nearly two years of negotiations and delay, he has moved his equipment. Now it all needs to be refurbished, repaired and realigned. Some of it sat rusting on the 48th Street property for almost two years, while Gabrielli tried to scrape up the money to move it. ADOT has been reimbursing him for his expenses, but he says it is slow paying his claims.
They don't relocate you when you want to be relocated," he says. They relocate you when they want to relocate you. They couldn't even find this place for me; I found it myself. I think they just looked through a listings book. They couldn't find anything comparable to what we had-they admitted it."
Gabrielli is a large man, who often interrupts his own sentences to launch into another thought that eventually splits off again, losing himself inside a dense thicket of hard-earned paranoia and moral outrage. He thrashes inside this jungle maze, hurt and caught as a bear in a trap. It seems that not even he can always keep straight the various facts and issues of his circumstances as he flips pages and stirs up desk drawers looking for a pertinent fact or date.
He is at his best when he just works, banging on a large spool coiled with wire to wrap his bundles or fashioning a makeshift joint to heal his trusty Crunch." Inside the building he is now leasing, as long as a football field and half again as wide, he can trace imaginary conveyor belts in the air, and talk of grading and sorting garbage automatically.
He is not a man who minds getting his hands dirty. I used to work two or three days a week with my crew sorting garbage," he says. I had to know what was coming in, where it came from, what time of the year, what kind of material was there, because I had to have that feeling of what's there." Even if the court awards him an amount closer to his valuation of the land than the state's, even if he somehow escapes the liability for the cleanup costs, Gabrielli will have lost a couple of productive years. The state is not liable to pay him for income he might have earned-perhaps as much as $500,000-had his business not been interrupted by the Hohokam Expressway construction. He suspects that the state has maliciously delayed paying him for his relocation expenses, that it is aware of his limited resources and hopes he will eventually just give in.
He says he won't. He's come back from the dead before.
I had polio as a child," he says. I'm probably one of the only people alive today who had over 90 percent of their body affected-92 percent. At one point, I think I was clinically dead."
It was 1953. He was 5 years old.
I remember that day, everything that went on," he says softly.
My grandfather was very, very special to me, and in fact, I was with him when this happened. I was in the back seat of his car, and I remember, I said something like, `Grandpa, I feel tired. I'm going to lie down.'"
Gabrielli's grandfather and parents took him to the family doctor, who ran a few tests on the boy's legs. The doctor said get this boy to the hospital before he dies, don't even wait for an ambulance," he says. My parents ran me from Pomona to Children's Hospital in L.A. I personally feel I was dead in the car, because I don't remember the trip there. I remember going into a bright room and being put on a cool table, and they stuck these long thin needles all the way down... and for hours and hours and hours they pulled the fluid out of my spine. They couldn't put me to sleep because I would have died. And they had me strapped down, I remember these thick leather straps.
While I was there, it was just me and my eyes and my mind. Really freaky."
For months after that Gabrielli was totally paralyzed. It was a couple of years before he learned how to walk.
Now he has a barely perceptible limp and a shelf of softball trophies. And a grand-opening date.
I do believe things get better as long as we keep faith and everything," he says. Now we're to this part of life where I'm a grown man and I'm real successful with what I do. I survive. I survived with my legs that hurt all the time. I'll survive this."
But there are times when he is less optimistic. He worries that he is not the same person he was before the state took his land. His confidence has been rattled. While he often strives to sound measured and confident, in his less- diplomatic moments, Gabrielli suspects that his office has been broken into, his files rifled, his telephone tapped. He thinks he's been set up.
part 3 of 4
YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK THE HOHOKAM FR... v4-08-92