This is an opinion column.

Governor Kay Ivey, is this how the story ends?

“The site in Jefferson County, Alabama, was never put on the NPL nor was Drummond deemed a responsible party. The poisonous toxins are still in the ground in North Birmingham. Drummond saved itself over 100 million dollars by preventing the land in North Birmingham it has contaminated from being deemed a Superfund cleanup site and put on the NPL.”

Those are not my words.

They’re from the court record — filed on behalf of David Roberson, the former vice president of Drummond Co., and one of two men convicted last year of bribing state Rep. Oliver Robinson as part of the very scheme he describes.

Roberson is suing Drummond Co., which fired him earlier this year, for $50 million. In his lawsuit, he accuses the company’s general counsel of setting him up to be a fall guy for the Alabama coal giant. Roberson also says the company’s law firm, Balch & Bingham, caused him to believe the scheme was legal, and he’s suing them, too.

Maybe it’s too much to swallow — that the former vice president of Drummond didn’t understand the bribes he was paying were bribes. After all, the jury in his federal corruption trial didn’t buy that argument.

But what’s important here isn’t that.

It’s this.

A former vice president of Drummond Co. now says there’s poison in the soil around the company’s ABC Coke plant in north Birmingham. And he says the company saved itself as much as $100 million by running a disinformation campaign.

Is that where we’re going to leave it?

In Alabama, we’re well practiced at ignoring our social, civic and environmental ills. Our history is an ugly habit of ignoring our history.

But just because we’re well practiced, that doesn’t mean we’re any good at making those problems go away.

This week the Washington Post visited to retell this sordid, ugly story to its national audience. Now the rest of the country knows what a lot of Alabama officials would rather pretend never happened.

At least two more national news outlets are interested in the story, I’m told.

This isn’t going away. You can ignore the problem. But the problem won’t ignore you.

Nor should it. Three men might be going to prison, but justice wasn’t served — not for the people of north Birmingham and Tarrant who still live with the uncertainty of what’s in the dirt their children play in.

It will be with us, as long as that dirt is still in the ground.

But this story could end another way.

The Justice Department could pursue its case further. So far, the US Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, Jay Town, has said only the men convicted already were responsible.

Does that change now that one of those men is saying that’s not true?

“DOJ and the EPA continue to discuss next steps as it concerns north Birmingham and Tarrant,” Town said when I asked him this week.

Also, the Environmental Protection Agency could add the north Birmingham Superfund site to its National Priorities List. If it did, then the EPA would cover 90 percent of cleanup costs. Alabama would have to pay the other 10 percent. Next, the EPA would pursue responsible polluters there to make them repay both the federal and state government.

This is the very thing that Drummond and Balch fought so hard to prevent.

Rep. Terri Sewell, Sen. Doug Jones and Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin have asked the EPA to put the north Birmingham site on the NPL, but the EPA has indicated that it won’t do so without the state’s cooperation — that matching 10 percent.

That would have to come from you, governor. And so far, your silence hasn’t been just deafening, but poisonous, too.

“I know corruption when I see it, and we are not having it.” Or at least, that’s what you said in your campaign ads last year.

In the last election cycle, Drummond Co. contributed $55,000 to your campaign. You took that money, even after this bribery scandal in Birmingham was public knowledge.

And you haven’t taken any steps to change the state’s posture on the north Birmingham pollution since you won reelection.

Is this how’s it going to be, governor? Is this how it ends?

“We cleaned up that mess,” you said last year, referring to corruption in Montgomery.

Uh, huh.

I’ll believe it when someone cleans up this mess in north Birmingham.

Kyle Whitmire is the state political columnist for the Alabama Media Group.

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Further reading on north Birmingham and Tarrant