ALBANY — An official with the U.S. Department of the Interior suggested earlier this month that more dredging for PCBs and additional habitat reconstruction in the Hudson River is necessary, despite assertions by General Electric Co. that it has completed clean-up work on a 40-mile stretch of the river.

Kathryn Jahn, DOI's Hudson River case manger, wrote to the director of the the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Hudson River Field Office Dec. 13 that the department, along with state and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officials, continues to be concerned about significant PCB contamination and its impacts on the river's ecosystem.

"Those injuries extend for over 200 miles, have lasted for decades, and will continue into the future," Jahn wrote to Gary Klawinski, the field office director. "The PCB contamination adversely impacts recreational fishing and hunting through consumption advisories, and has potential adverse impacts to birds, mink and other wildlife. Restoration options, particularly in the Upper Hudson River, may be limited by the amount and concentration of PCB contamination that remains bioavailable in the river."

Jahn wrote that additional PCB removal and "robust" habitat reconstruction "will accelerate the recovery of the river and its resources, which will reduce restoration required and facilitate the ecological and economic recovery of the Hudson River."

Jahn's letter comes as the EPA mulls whether GE has sufficiently scrubbed the river of PCBs — which the company legally dumped in the river from its capacitor plants in Hudson Falls and Fort Edward — under the terms of 2002 agreement with the agency to clean up the Hudson. The company spent seven years and $1.7 billion working on the stretch of the river between Fort Edward and Troy, announcing that work was completed in 2015.

GE filed a request for a certificate of completion from the EPA in December 2016. The agency had until Dec. 23 to respond, but a decision has yet to be announced. EPA spokesman David Kluesner said the agency received Jahn's letter and "we are giving full consideration to these and other comments we have received about the certification of completion."

GE has asserted that its work is done.

"GE removed all of the PCBs that the U.S. EPA targeted for removal, and EPA has called the project a success that will achieve the agency's goals of protecting public health and the environment," GE spokesman Mark Behan said Friday.

Regardless of the decision, the saga over river contamination won't end. If EPA agrees that GE has completed its responsibilities, Gov. Andrew Cuomo's administration and state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman are prepared to sue the agency. Cuomo's Department of Environmental Conservation conducted its own PCB tests in the Hudson over the summer, charging that they turned up evidence of up to three times more contamination than the EPA originally estimated.

"New York State had 16 years to object to this project and did not do so," Behan said after the state's plan to sue was announced earlier this month. "It in fact endorsed the project when significantly less PCBs were going to be taken out of the river than were ultimately removed."

Behan said at the time that there is no dispute that GE has met its commitments to the EPA and the state.

mhamilton@timesunion.com • 518-454-5449 •@matt_hamilton10