The appraisals which justified and, therefore, facilitated the purchase of wet, polluted, unusable land from former Mayor William Macera (D-Johnston) and his family by the RIRRC, aka the Central Landfill, for many times its actual value. Mike Stanton reported in Sunday’s Providence Journal:

Resource Recovery paid $163,000 an acre for the property, the current audit notes — a price that would have been consistent with other area land prices “assuming the land was usable.” But because of the dump, not all of the land was usable. And auditors could find no appraisals or any information “regarding the value of the property.”
“Serious environmental issues do exist” that will require “substantial” cleanup costs, the audit concluded.

In addition to the appraisals, we have an A.P.B. out for either the invoice of services by the appraiser or the cancelled checks in payment of same. These appraisals must have been quite special; extraordinary, in fact. Was a correspondingly extraordinary fee invoiced or disbursed for it?
We should note also that the source of the $8m was compulsory fees collected from the people and businesses of Rhode Island. Inasmuch as the RIRRC was able to accummulate $8m from those fees to spend on unusable land, clearly, there is room for an adustment of the fee structure at the Central Landfill.