His constituents sued a trash company for polluting. A Saugus selectman helped the company fight them.

There is a difference between negotiating with a company and doing its bidding. Saugus Selectman Anthony Cogliano appears to have leapt over the line when it comes to WIN Waste and its noxious ash landfill.

A worker looked out the window as smoke poured out of a trash incinerator in Saugus in 2020.Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff

Who does the chairman of the Saugus Board of Selectmen work for?

Is it the people of Saugus? Or is it the nation’s oldest trash incinerator, which has spewed pollutants into his community and others nearby for decades?

The question is a perennial one among those who live near the incinerator and ash landfill 12 miles north of Boston, given Anthony Cogliano’s longtime friendliness to WIN Waste, the company that owns the plant, and his strenuous support for expanding the ash landfill that takes the incinerator’s waste. But it’s become more urgent lately, as legal documents have revealed that Cogliano not only has been publicly sympathetic to the company but has also worked behind the scenes to help it fight a class action suit by neighbors, including some of his own constituents. Worse, some of the people he recruited to support WIN Waste in the lawsuit had no idea what they were agreeing to.

“The town of Saugus has a public official who is definitely in league with the incinerator company,” said Kirstie Pecci, a longtime opponent of the plant and executive director of Just Zero, a national nonprofit advancing zero waste solutions. “He seems to think [the company’s] vision is the right vision for the town.”

Cogliano said that any suggestion that he lacks commitment to his constituents is offensive.

“I have been dedicated to my hometown for my entire life,” he said in a statement. He’s working for Saugus residents, not the company, he said, trying to win them better benefits from a plant he believes is there to stay.

But it should have been gone long ago. The incinerator — on the fragile Rumney Marsh Reservation — generates poisons associated with asthma and cancer. It is the oldest in the country, and Massachusetts has forbidden any like it to be built ever again. When the plant runs smoothly, those noxious byproducts are dumped in a 50-foot-high landfill on the water’s edge, where the company says they are safely contained. Its critics say the chemicals leach into the waterways, and that a big flood would be disastrous. And when the plant doesn’t run smoothly, ash and toxics have been belched into the air and the wetlands.

The landfill was ordered closed in 1996, but in a series of events too unfortunate to go into here, was instead allowed to keep expanding. Finally, in late 2021, Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Martin Suuberg issued a strong statement saying the state would not approve any more expansions, which would force the landfill to close within a few years. Pecci and others say that would likely force the incinerator to shut down, too.

But Cogliano believes shutting down the landfill would just force the company to send its dirty ash elsewhere, in trucks that will travel along Saugus streets. The incinerator isn’t going anywhere, he maintains. So he established a town committee, of which he is chair, to negotiate a host agreement with WIN Waste that would allow it to expand the landfill (pending state approval) in exchange for better community benefits.

“For over 46 years, our town has had no relationship with WIN Waste, and we have not received any of the most basic benefits,” he said. “That’s millions of lost dollars.”

But there is a difference between negotiating with a company and doing its bidding. And when it comes to a class action suit against WIN Waste, Cogliano appears to have leapt headlong over that line.

After more than 50 neighbors signed onto a lawsuit claiming the incinerator and landfill repeatedly released noxious odors, particulates, and dust onto their properties, the company asked Cogliano to help round up residents who would sign legal declarations stating the opposite. In a deposition, the selectman said Jack Walsh, WIN’s liaison to the community, “nagged me about the declarations to make sure we got them.”

Cogliano called up sympathetic friends and relatives and asked them whether they were bothered by the plant. Under oath, Cogliano acknowledged he did not tell them the details of what they were agreeing to, or that the declarations were part of a lawsuit, or that agreeing to them might affect their legal rights if there was a settlement. Then the selectman himself signed all of their names to the declarations.

After WIN Waste attorneys learned that Cogliano had signed all the declarations, they sent the selectman out with Walsh to get a second set of declarations, this time with genuine signatures. They rushed around town trying to get that done. Even then, however, Cogliano still did not tell those who signed the second set of documents what they were agreeing to, or that it was part of a federal lawsuit. Some were none too pleased.

“I thought this was something that had to do with him and his politics,” his friend John Cooper testified in a deposition. “Maybe he pulled a fast one on me.” Other signatories said they had no idea what they had signed or that the lawsuit existed.

Cogliano was not the only official helping WIN: According to a document in the class action suit, WIN said Revere City Councillor Tony Zambuto also went to bat for the company, providing four declarations of support, including his own, though they were ultimately excluded from the company’s filings.

But Cogliano went above and beyond, turning in some 20 declarations, including his own. Now a federal judge will decide whether those documents should be thrown out.

In a statement, WIN called the class action suit “meritless,” and defended its conduct in gathering the declarations, saying when its lawyers learned what Cogliano had done they asked him to get authentic signatures from the residents. The company is still looking for a way to keep the landfill open, and to “share the resulting environmental and economic benefits with the Town.”

That means convincing the state to allow WIN to grow that toxic pile higher than 50 feet.

The DEP can and should put an end to this with another unequivocal declaration that that will never happen.

Harder to resolve: Divining the loyalties of Selectman Anthony Cogliano, elected to represent all of the residents of Saugus, not just some of them.