The company has come under scrutiny for environmental violations and was the subject of an investigative report in the November/December 2006 Mother Jones magazine:
Like many people in Herculaneum, a town of 2,800 along the Mississippi River 30 miles south of St. Louis, Leslie Warden and her husband, Jack, were unaware of exactly what came belching out of the 550-foot smokestack about a quarter mile from their house. High school sweethearts, they’d bought a fixer-upper in 1988. Jack worked as a union carpenter, Leslie as a bookkeeper and secretary. Many of their neighbors had jobs at the Doe Run smelter, which employs about 240 workers and produces up to 250,000 tons of lead a year. Sometimes fumes from the plant made it hard to see across the street. "My wife would wash clothes and hang them on the line, and she’d have to rewash them because they’d get soot on them from the smelter," Jerry Martin, a former mayor, recalls. Occasionally, someone from the company would come around to test the tap water or offer free grass seed to fill in the bare spots in residents’ yards. When an acid plume drifted over from the plant and corroded the paint on cars, the company would pay for the bodywork.
In 1997, a plume damaged Leslie Warden’s brand-new Mustang, and this time Doe Run refused to fix it. If the plant’s emissions could harm her car, she wondered, what about her 13-year-old son’s lungs? Could his add be connected to pollution from the smelter? She started calling public health and environmental agencies, inquiring about the gray, sticky deposits on her deck, the trucks that rumbled through town, and the acrid air.
This is the second time Hartley has registered with the state. For a period of a little over a month in 2005, he was registered to lobby for the Missouri Association of Realtors.
Cassidy parlayed his position as Blunt's chief of staff into a top post at the powerful Washington lobbying firm of Cassidy & Associates.
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