Onondaga County reaches settlement over sludge dryer contract secrecy dispute

Onondaga County and the company that built its troubled sludge dryer have settled a lawsuit that tried to keep contract details out of public view. The agreement narrows the secrecy fight, but it does not fully open the records taxpayers have been asking to see.

Wendel Energy Services, LLC filed suit in New York Supreme Court, Onondaga County, on March 25, 2026, seeking to block the county from releasing sludge dryer contract information to syracuse.com | The Post-Standard. Under the settlement reported April 13, 2026, Wendel agreed to fewer redactions than it originally wanted, a change that trims the amount of withheld material without ending the dispute over what the public can examine.

That fight sits inside a much larger failure at the Metropolitan Syracuse Wastewater Treatment Plant. The county cut the ribbon on the Biosolids Dryer Building in October 2023, but the project later became a symbol of delay and dysfunction. The building finished in 2024 and has remained idle because the air quality inside was considered too dangerous for workers, at times keeping employees out of the space entirely.

The financial picture has grown more troubling as the dryer has stayed offline. The project was originally budgeted at $15 million and was supposed to save taxpayers about $2 million a year in trucking costs. Instead, it was later described as more than two years late and about 50% over budget, with the total cost reported at $23 million.

County records and committee minutes show the shutdown had a direct budget impact. On Aug. 19, 2025, the Onondaga County Legislature was told sludge and biosolid disposal costs had increased because the Metro WWTP dryer was not fully operational, and the county requested a $2.1 million budget transfer to cover unplanned hauling and disposal expenses. The committee minutes said there was no timeline at that point for the dryer to become fully operational.

That is why the contract-secrecy dispute matters beyond one legal filing. The public was being asked to trust a costly county infrastructure project that was already late, over budget, and not doing the job it was built to do. The settlement improves access only slightly by limiting redactions, but it leaves a central question intact: how much of the paperwork behind a failed public works project should taxpayers be allowed to see when the bill keeps rising?