The Sun Journal appeared as though it were soliciting an advertising contract rather than acting as an independent community newspaper in its July 25 editorial about a superior court’s recent decision overturning the Oxford Casino’s environmental permits.

In that suit, brought by the Androscoggin River Alliance, the court ruled that the Maine Department of Environmental Protection violated its own rules by granting permits to Black Bear Development for the construction of Phase I of the Oxford Casino without considering the environmental impacts of the entire project.

Maine’s Site Location of Development Act prohibits developments from adversely impacting water and air quality, groundwater supplies, and other environmental values. This is because, as Sen. Olympia Snowe recently noted, in Maine, “the environment is the economy.” Developers, however, sometimes seek to evade the law and hide environmental impacts by segmenting large projects into smaller pieces.

That is exactly what Black Bear did in this case. It proposed and was awarded permits for Phase 1 of the Oxford Casino even though there is no safe place to dump the casino’s sewage at full-build out.

Decades-old DEP regulations are designed to block this ploy by requiring that approval of early phases of a large development “shall be based on compliance of the entire proposed development with the standards of the Site Location Law.” (DEP Rules, chapter 372, §10) Every administration until now — Republican, Democratic and independent — has reviewed large-scale phase projects in exactly the same manner.

This DEP, however, ignored and refused to enforce this rule — despite appeals from ARA and from other neighbors concerned about pollution of the Little Androscoggin River and Whitney and Hogan ponds.

The court found that DEP’s action was illegal and, tellingly, neither DEP nor Black Bear has appealed the ruling. If the Sun Journal disagrees with these longstanding and well understood rules, it should say so and not mislead the public into believing that the judge made a bad decision or that ARA’s appeal was baseless.

More importantly, Black Bear must now solve the inevitable sewage problem and other impacts of the casino.

Gov. Paul LePage should not order DEP to ignore the court and allow Black Bear to violate the clear rules that every other business in Maine must follow. That’s bad for business and bad for the environment.

For its part, the Sun Journal should do a better job at editorializing over what the courts have found is plainly illegal behavior by state government. Instead, it attacked the messenger, editorializing that ARA is anti-casino. That statement is entirely baseless and deserves a retraction and apology.

Laurence A. Faiman, Auburn, president, Androscoggin River Alliance

Neil A. Ward, Leeds, executive director, Androscoggin River Alliance