By Dan Klepal
The Cincinnati Enquirer

The U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit against Cinergy Corp. is about to get bigger.

The lawsuit, filed in 1999, alleges the energy company expanded its plants - and profits - in Indiana and Ohio without installing new pollution controls to protect the environment and human health.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials sent Cinergy two new "notices of violation" on April 1, stating that six of the utility's coal-burning power plants repeatedly violated the Clean Air Act since 1990, by investing in plant expansions or equipment to extend the life of those plants without installing equipment to stop pollution from spewing from its smoke stacks.

The new charges are identical to those in the lawsuit, just additional incidents.

Kurt Waltzer, a clean-air program associate with the Ohio Environmental Council, said the notices had to be sent to Cinergy before the lawsuit could be amended to include the additional incidents.

The Ohio Environmental Council, along with the Hoosier Environmental Council, joined the government's lawsuit against Cinergy and are part of the negotiations seeking an out-of-court settlement.

The trial is scheduled for August 2005.

"As we get closer to the trial date, the EPA is filing these notices so they can amend the complaint and have all the (alleged) violations brought before the court," Waltzer said.

EPA officials did not return phone messages left Friday.

Cinergy spokeswoman Kathy Meinke agreed that the notices mean the lawsuit will expand. She declined to comment on the merits of the allegations.

"We continue to be willing to negotiate, even as we prepare for trial," Meinke said.

Those negotiations haven't produced much over the past four years.

Cinergy signed a tentative agreement to settle the lawsuit in 2000. But that agreement was never finalized, and the parties have been talking every since.

Jim Rogers, Cinergy's chief executive, has said his company refused to finalize the deal because the government is insisting that it install about $400 million in additional pollution controls that weren't part of the tentative agreement. Environmental groups have said Cinergy has been stalling ever since the Bush administration took office because the company knew it would try to change the Clean Air Act.

Whatever the case, Cinergy told its shareholders in a mandatory quarterly filing earlier this year that a settlement is "unlikely" and that the billion-dollar issue is probably headed for a courtroom.

The Cinergy plants listed in the most recent notice of violation include Miami Fort Generating Station in North Bend and the Beckjord plant in New Richmond.

The notices say the violations "have resulted in massive amounts of (nitrogen oxide) and/or (sulfur dioxide) having been and being released into the environment."

Those pollutants help create smog, which can lead to respiratory illness and even premature death.

E-mail dklepal@enquirer.com