Sentenced to talk : Jim Smith has to give three lecture on toxic wastes. If prosecutors want a man of stricken conscience, they picked the wrong guy.

As a college student, Jim Smith thought of majoring in environmental science.

Then “three great truths dawned on me,” Smith said.

There was no money in it, the kids entering the field “were all kind of nerdy” and “there weren’t as many attractive girls . . . as there were in other departments.”

Smith took a degree in business instead.

Still, Smith thought of himself as something of an environmentalist. If you had told him he would one day be prosecuted as a polluter, “I would have told you you were absolutely crazy,” he said.

Recently, however, the 38-year-old Canoga Park resident pleaded no contest to three of the 87 hazardous-waste counts that had been pending nearly two years against him; his former employer, Space Ordnance Systems, and two other company executives.

Space Ordnance Systems, or SOS, a Santa Clarita Valley aerospace and defense contractor, paid a $300,000 fine. Under plea agreements, the two other company officials received brief jail terms. But under his plea agreement, Smith, SOS’ former director of administration, was ordered in Los Angeles Municipal Court to give three lectures on the pitfalls of violating hazardous waste laws in lieu of a jail term.

So there he stood two Saturdays ago, giving the first lecture to an audience of officials from some of the same state and county agencies that had raided SOS and built the case against him.

Smith admitted to being a tad nervous. He tried breaking the ice with gallows humor, comparing himself to a mythical desperado whose hanging drew a large crowd.

When the condemned man was asked if he had any last words, Smith told the gathering, he replied: “‘If it weren’t for the honor of it all, I think I’d rather be somewhere else.’ ”

Yet if prosecutors wanted a man of stricken conscience to help send a message, they picked the wrong guy.

Smith is basically unrepentant. He sees himself as a victim of his own ignorance of environmental laws and a company whose drive for profit was not “properly balanced” by a sense of its other responsibilities.

At SOS, Smith said in an interview, “the management philosophy and ethics were not in place to do an adequate job” of meeting environmental rules.

Smith has a much kinder assessment of his own involvement. “In my own mind, I spent an awful lot of time and effort to try and correct some situations that I thought were substandard,” he said.

“I have a very difficult time with his self-serving . . . comments,” a top official with SOS’ corporate parent, TransTechnology Corp. of Sherman Oaks, said in response to Smith’s remarks.

Smith’s view of his role also is somewhat at odds with information provided to prosecutors by SOS workers interviewed during the investigation in 1984. According to some of these accounts, Smith was aware of and sanctioned some of the activities that got the company in trouble.

Nonetheless, Smith contends, his only crime was “stupidity” for not “being more adamant and more outspoken.”

“I don’t really think of myself as a corporate polluter,” he said.

Jim Smith is a husky, bespectacled man whose black beard is flecked with gray. He has an acid sense of humor and sounds almost flip on the subject of his legal tangle and current unemployment.

After serving in the Army in Vietnam, becoming a captain by his 22nd birthday, Smith earned his business degree at Pepperdine University in 1980. The same year he became a safety officer at SOS, where several workers had been killed or seriously injured in explosions and fires. Within a couple of years, he became director of administration at an annual salary of $43,000 and with responsibility over personnel and safety.

SOS operates two plants near Canyon Country, making explosive and pyrotechnic devices for space programs and the military, including decoy flares designed to lure heat-seeking missiles away from jet fighters. The work generates a steady stream of explosive waste that cannot be taken to ordinary landfills.

SOS had been burning this waste at Ft. Irwin Military Reservation, near Barstow, or at its Mint Canyon plant, but both options were closed by 1983.

Had No Backup Plan

The company had no backup disposal plan nor permits needed for long-term storage at its property. Nonetheless, production continued and explosive waste accumulated, eventually filling more than 2,000 drums.

The work also produced waste mixtures of water and solvents, some of which SOS disposed of by spraying into the air through sprinkler-like devices. According to evidence gathered by prosecutors, liquid waste also was poured into bottomless sumps, open concrete tanks without floors, to keep the liquid from seeping into the ground.

State and county officials raided the SOS plants in March, 1984. SOS, Smith and two other company officials later were charged with 87 misdemeanors--basically one count each relating to waste disposal, waste storage and transportation for each week between the fall of 1983 and the raid.

SOS this spring pleaded no contest to 10 counts and agreed to pay $300,000. After pleading no contest to the same three illegal storage counts as Smith, Mike Murphy, former SOS director of operations, was sentenced to 30 days in jail and Joseph Cabaret, former SOS president and general manager, got 15 days.

Downplays Significance

The case was “not as significant as some of the cases we have handled, in terms of actual, present danger to the environment or people,” according to John Lynch, acting head of the Los Angeles district attorney’s environmental crimes and occupational safety division.

Nevertheless, the company had disposed of liquid waste “with what looks like a conscious disregard of its effect on the ground water,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. John P. Bernardi, one of the prosecutors. Fortunately, as industrial chemicals go, most of those in use at SOS were low to moderately toxic. The large quantity of explosive waste was the greatest element of risk.

Of the spraying, Smith said: “I don’t think it did any harm. It’s going to come out sounding really callous though, you know that?”

Smith said that neither he nor others at SOS knew the liquid waste legally was classified as hazardous.

“You need to realize how naive we were,” Smith said. It was “really sad.”

Top management at TransTechnology had no such excuse, Smith contends. They “had the benefit of some expert advice” as to their legal responsibilities.

Remained on Payroll

Although Smith stayed on the SOS payroll until after the sentencing in May, he had been on indefinite leave since last summer because of deteriorating relations with other company officials. In the company’s eyes, and his own, he had ceased being a team player.

SOS facilities, Smith said in an interview, “were inadequate to support the level of business that TransTechnology was trying to make happen in that place.”

Yet there was fierce resistance to “any kind of improvements that cost money”--whether in safety or environmental protection, or even “raises for the employees, for chrissakes . . . who were not well paid,” Smith said.

At SOS, Smith said, a percentage of pretax profits went into a “bonus pool” to be divided among half a dozen company officials, including himself. Even though his share of the pool was the smallest, Smith said, he received a $20,000 bonus one year.

“Almost any decision was questioned in terms of its profit impact and secondarily its bonus impact,” Smith said.

Characterizations Disputed

Officials with TransTechnology disputed Smith’s characterizations of the company.

“We did not put profit motive ahead of the law” and “never have,” TransTechnology Vice President Burl Alison said. “It’s just that we’re a large company, and it’s very difficult to monitor everything that happens.”

When the bills are all in, SOS will have spent close to $6 million for legal fees and penalties and cleanup work and only 15% to 20% will have been reimbursed by insurers, Alison said.

SOS, too, was “ignorant,” Alison said. “I think we’ve paid dearly for that.”

Smith gave his first talk, on June 21, to an environmental law enforcement seminar.

He told his audience of 35 to “realize that the corporate representatives that you’re going to routinely deal with have very limited authority” to solve environmental problems.

“If these will involve significant expenditures or loss of production time . . . the decision is going to get made on a very senior level.”

Government conduct during the SOS raid also got a critique.

During the raid, Smith said, a television camera crew rolled some drums over to a fence and climbed on top for a better shot.

“God knows what’s in the drums,” Smith said, yet “a lot of the regulatory people stood there and watched this.”

Smith told how one inspector smoked a cigarette at the edge of the explosive waste storage area and how others stood on top of an explosives storage magazine.

Evidently little thought went into the problem of taking waste samples from an explosives plant, Smith said.

Sample Starts Bubbling

An emergency arose, he said, when one sample started bubbling while in storage and had to be hauled away to be neutralized. “Conceivably, you could have created a very serious hazard for yourselves,” he said.

Smith also said that, after local air quality officials refused to allow SOS’ huge stockpile of waste to be burned in the desert of northeastern Los Angeles County, the company was forced to transport the waste long distances--some for storage at a former Army munitions depot in South Dakota and the rest for disposal at a licensed hazardous waste site in rural South Carolina.

Smith showed some slides of the site in South Carolina.

There was a titter from the audience as the first slide clicked into view. It showed aging barrels piled everywhere, the scene looking like a real mess.

“Interesting place,” Smith murmured.

“Look at the ground right there, too,” Smith said as another slide filled the screen. Amid a row of drums were large puddles of standing water, which could rust the drums.

Offers Gloomy Prediction

Smith closed with a gloomy prediction. With hazardous waste disposal sites continually closing, and opponents blocking new ones, he told the regulators, “you’re going to have problems like you just haven’t ever seen yet. . . .

“You’re going to find yourself in a much more adversary role than you ever thought about being in.”

Industry will continue to drain the regulatory agencies of much of their experienced personnel, Smith said. As the agencies shrink in competence and experience, they will focus more than ever on smaller businesses, “something they can get their arms around. Something they can deal with,” he said.

The audience applauded when Smith finished, although a state health official said the speech didn’t change her view that “an environmental crime was committed.”

“White collar, blue collar, it was a crime,” she said.

For Jim Smith, though, it was one down, two to go. A class of graduate business students, then a waste hauler’s association, and he will be a free man.