Citing directives from federal investigators as well as advice from the county attorney, Cayuga County Legislature Chairman George Fearon had said little publicly until last week about the asbestos scandal that has rocked county government under his leadership.

But he finally broke his silence in a televised debate with Lon Fricano in the race for the Legislature's District 7 seat.

Fearon denied he had immediate knowledge that illegal asbestos removal was taking place at a county building in February 2006. Although the county buildings superintendent at the time has stated he told Fearon about the problem while it was going on, the chairman said he never had knowledge about anything being done improperly until June 2006.

But even if Fearon's version of who-knew-what-when is true, he still made a grave mistake in not taking more immediate action once he was informed.

The employees in the county Board of Elections and the public were not told about this potential problem until late July. That's roughly a month after Fearon and possibly other county leaders knew about the asbestos situation.

Fearon said there was no rush to inform other people because they thought the asbestos had been contained to a specific area in the building. As most people know, that was an extremely poor assumption.

Once the county learned of the federal investigation into matter and began taking concrete steps to deal with the situation, they learned that asbestos was in the air of that building. It had to be shut down immediately for safety reasons.

Unfortunately, that shutdown took place after people in that building had already been exposed to this dangerous material for roughly five months.

As soon as Fearon or anyone else knew about this problem, they had a responsibility to act on it no matter how minimal they thought the problem might be. Asbestos exposure is not something to take lightly, but it seems the chairman learned this lesson far too late.