WHAT A DUMP: From Sewage Scandal to City Hall, Waste Management’s Greg Sullivan Seeks District V Commission Seat
Waste Management area manager who oversaw the response to a DEP criminal investigation into illegal dumping at Little Hamaca Park by one of his employee’s now wants your vote.
KEY WEST — Greg Sullivan, the former Waste Management area manager whose name became synonymous with a 2023 criminal investigation into the illegal dumping of raw sewage at Little Hamaca Park, want’s your vote for Key West City Commission District V seat.
Sullivan — supported by a number of special interest donors including Ed Swift’s Historic Tours of America and a number of his hi-ranking executives, the Spottswood Family and other entrenched Chamber of Commerce businesses — faces challenger Chris Massicotte in the Aug. 18 election.
Sullivan’s candidacy comes roughly two-and-a-half years after the Florida Department of Environmental Protection opened a criminal investigation into alleged illegal dumping of raw sewage near a city utilities lift station in the park — an episode that drew armed DEP investigators to Waste Management’s local offices and prompted the city to permanently disable the lift station.
Above the Fold’s Ted Lund originally broke the story in 2023 while working for The Keys Citizen.
The alleged dumping occurred on Dec. 4, 2023, and was captured in photographs by a neighborhood resident who frequently walks Little Hamaca with her daughter.
The resident, who at the time asked to be identified only by her first name, Rachel, said she was at the park with her dog and her 5-year-old daughter when the stench of raw sewage filled the air.
“She loves to catch minnows and crabs around the culverts with a dip net. This whole thing disgusts and angers me,” Rachel said at the time. “How can the water be pristine one minute, and then 20 minutes later, there is a smell of raw sewage and toilet paper flowing by?”
The dumping that was reported (which the whistleblower said happened regularly like clockwork) occurred during an outgoing tide, meaning whatever was spilled or dumped wafted down Riviera Canal past multi-million dollar homes and boats into Cow Key Channel.
Rachel’s photographs showed a long hose trailing from a Waste Management vacuum truck into the mangroves — away from the lift station hookup, which was overgrown with waist-high vegetation at the time. The images also showed what appeared to be toilet paper and puddles of raw sewage on the ground. The trucks are used to empty Port-a-potties which the City contracted from Waste Management for large events like Fantasy Fest and the Power Boat Races
Drag marks could be seen in the mud leading through the mangrove mangle.
The vacuum truck, which holds 750 gallons of raw sewage collected from portable toilets throughout the city and county, had backed into the site.
The fixture and hose on the Waste Management truck is on the passenger side of the vehicle. The connection to the lift station is on the driver’s side. Connecting and pumping out would require the hose to run underneath the back of the truck. But photographs showed the hose running into the mangroves.
The lift station connects directly to the Richard Heyman Water Treatment Plant on Fleming Key and is overseen by wastewater conglomerate Jacobs/OMI. City officials said Jacobs/OMI had overstepped its authority by allowing Waste Management to use the pump-out at the lift station without city authorization.
“The city absolutely did not authorize them to use that location,” a clearly agitated former City Manager Al Childress told me at the time.
City and state officials confirmed the DEP criminal investigation on Dec. 7, 2023, but declined to comment because it was ongoing. Although they visited the site, investigators arrived too late to take any substantive water quality readings or test for the presence of raw fecal matter.
Sullivan acknowledged at the time that he was aware of the investigation but subsequently stopped returning phone calls.
Waste Management’s director of communications, Dawn McCormick, issued a statement saying the company had “been cooperating with state and local officials since Monday in this matter and will continue to do so.”
Key West Vice Mayor Sam Kaufman was alarmed by the allegations.
“Upon learning about the DEP investigation, I asked the City Manager to respond to the alleged WM violation and make a report to the City Commission,” Kaufman said. “Protecting our environment is the highest priority. If this allegation is true, this illegal dumping is grossly unacceptable, and WM needs to be held accountable and commit to a detailed plan to clean the area with safeguards to ensure this never happens again.”
Sullivan quickly oversaw a cleanup of the dump site, clearing the overgrowth with a plastic catch basin installed as a barrier to contain future spills.
But the seriousness and speed of his response raised questions. Armed investigators from the Florida DEP’s law enforcement division subsequently executed a search of Waste Management’s local offices as part of the criminal investigation.
Waste Management was eventually cleared of wrongdoing. The dumping appeared to be the actions of a rogue employee. But the gravity of Sullivan’s response — the immediate cleanup, the mitigation measures, the before-and-after documentation — while not directly indicating prior knowledge of the dumping, implied an awareness of the situation that went beyond a manager learning about it after the fact.
In the wake of the investigation, then-City Manager Childress ordered City workers to permanently disable the Little Hamaca lift station, encasing it in a Chernobyl-esque concrete shroud — ensuring it could never be used for unauthorized pump-outs again.
Childress was later terminated by the commission in a 4-3 vote on June 26, 2024, in what critics described as a concerted, orchestrated effort by members of the Key West Chamber of Commerce and commissioners including Jimmy Weekley and Billy Wardlow — a faction dubbed the “Bubba Bozo trio” following their felony indictments by a Monroe County Grand Jury. Those cases are still on-going.
Sullivan now asks voters in District V — which includes sections of Old Town in the Casa Marina District — to entrust him with a seat on the city commission. The election is Aug. 18.