The site of the now-closed HoltraChem Manufacturing Co. plant in Orrington will be cleaned up, federal regulators say, but who will pay for the job remains sketchy.

Officials at the Maine Department of Environmental Protection worry that HoltraChem, which has admitted it has little money left, soon may go out of business, leaving a mess, including mercury-contaminated soil and water. That could mean that the spot on the banks of the Penobscot River would become a Superfund site, where the federal government cleans up and looks for parties to pay for the work later.

Meanwhile, the true identity of HoltraChem is slowly becoming clearer, a fact of interest to environmental officials.

Corporate officials at HoltraChem Manufacturing have long maintained that the company is an independent entity consisting solely of two chemical plants, the one in Orrington and another in North Carolina. But, it turns out, the company is owned in part by Honeywell International, a giant defense contractor that is merging with General Electric.

While not divulging how big a share Honeywell owns, company President Steve Guidry said this week that HoltraChem LLC, which owns the manufacturing company, consists of two entities – Honeywell International and HoltraChem GP. Guidry said HoltraChem GP Inc. is owned by an individual who used to own an entity called HoltraChem Inc., the distribution arm of HoltraChem LLC, located in Natick, Mass.

Articles of incorporation for HoltraChem GP filed with the secretary of the commonwealth in Massachusetts list Herbert Roskind as the company’s president and treasurer.

Guidry confirmed Friday that Roskind is an “investor” in HoltraChem. He said it is not right to term Honeywell and Roskind as owners. Rather, he said, they are simply investors. They bear no more liability for HoltraChem’s operations than does someone who bought a share of stock in a company for $10.

“It really doesn’t matter who invested in HoltraChem,” Guidry said.

The Maine Department of Environmental Protection, however, says it does matter, because HoltraChem soon may cease to exist while a vast amount of cleanup work costing millions of dollars remains to be done in Orrington.

Guidry said the concerns about the company’s financial stability are “correct.”

“HoltraChem is seriously short of funds to do anything short of operate the wastewater treatment plant and some minor cleanup,” he said Friday. He said he did not know how much longer the company would exist.

The Orrington site, where 130 tons of mercury was used to make chlorine and other chemicals, mostly for paper companies, is in a “very stable state” and HoltraChem hopes to “buy enough time for others to get involved,” Guidry said.

The “others” include former owners of the Orrington plant. One such former owner, Mallinckrodt Inc., already has committed to helping with a site investigation and cleanup.

Guidry said the “others” also included the original owner operator of HoltraChem Inc. That would be Roskind.

Calls to Roskind at his home in Scottsdale, Ariz., were not returned.

A 1985 story in Inc. magazine credits Roskind with building HoltraChem from zero to $30 million in sales in just nine years. In that article, Roskind said: “Building a company is the easy part. Managing it is the tough part. I’m an entrepreneur and a deal-maker, not a manager.”

Roskind, a 1957 graduate of Dartmouth College, said he succeeded in the chemical business despite a lack of technical training – he majored in English.

On a computerized bulletin board where Dartmouth classmates shared messages in May of last year, Roskind reminisced about his classes, especially an introduction to chemistry course that “served me very well for 40 years in the chemical business.” He got his “first and maybe only” A in that class.

“Many of my colleagues, competitors and engineers do not believe I had so little training, but valences, periodic tables, molecular weights and other concepts stuck from [the] class. The rest I picked up on the job,” Roskind wrote in the message.

Although Roskind is part owner of the HoltraChem plant, he bears no responsibility for the plant’s cleanup, Guidry said.

As an LLC, or limited liability company, HoltraChem is set up so that a manager runs the day-to-day operations, while the people or companies that provide the financing for the LLC remain “distant investors,” said company president Guidry.

He said he is that manager. As the person who ran HoltraChem, he made the recommendation to shut down the company because it was losing money, Guidry said, deflecting speculation that Honeywell wanted to dump the company due to its potential environmental liability.

Honeywell became involved in 1999 when it acquired AlliedSignal Inc., another defense contractor. Allied Signal provided HoltraChem with financing in 1993 to buy three chemical plants, including the one in Orrington from LCP Chemicals when that company went bankrupt. According to news reports at the time, the plants’ owners received $9 million in cash as part of the transaction.

Officials at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which is reviewing the Orrington facility as a potential Superfund site, said this week they had not confirmed that Honeywell was a part owner of the plant, although they are looking into the issue.

The tangled ownership web of HoltraChem does not need to be unraveled, an EPA spokesman said, because the company remains in business as a viable entity.

“Viable owners have been identified,” said Mark Merchant for the EPA. “And, past owners are being cooperative.”

Under a 1995 consent decree between HoltraChem and the EPA, the company accepts responsibility for studying and cleaning up any contamination caused by spills or routine operations of the plant. The study phase is still under way.

“If HoltraChem goes belly up, there are guidelines to transfer responsibility without the consent decree losing its teeth,” Merchant said. He termed the consent decree “a legally binding contract to get the place cleaned up.”

As part of the same agreement, Mallinckrodt Inc., which owned the plant from 1967 to 1982, has admitted that it shared some of the responsibility for cleaning up the facility and contamination of sediment in the Penobscot River.

Still, Merchant said, “it does matter to us who owns HoltraChem … because we need to be efficient.” He said his agency was continuing to investigate the company’s ownership.

While EPA feels confident it has a company or two on the hook to clean up the HoltraChem site, state officials aren’t so sure. Ed Logue, eastern Maine regional director of the DEP, worries that HoltraChem won’t be around after March. In a closure plan filed with the agency, the company said it had enough money on hand to run a mandatory wastewater treatment facility for five months. Nearly half of that money, $600,000, would come from Mallinckrodt, the plan said.

“HoltraChem has only very limited financial resources and is not able to provide complete financial assurances for post-closure activities,” the company said in its plan.

The closure plan was rejected by the DEP because it lacked details on how many buildings and how much land was contaminated by chemicals and how they would be cleaned up.

Although a contract for such services has been awarded, Guidry said no demolition or major cleanup work could be done until the DEP approves a closure plan. He said a revised plan would be filed, but he would not say whether that plan would be put together by HoltraChem alone.

Guidry said the company hopes to maintain the plant in its current “stable” phase while more money is found for demolition and cleanup. He said former owners and the Superfund program are the only two sources of such money.