State regulators ordered a Florida company to pay $205,000 in fines for rupturing pipes and bungling drilling operations while building the Coos County natural gas pipeline.

The accidents spilled mud into sensitive fish-spawning habitat along the route from Roseburg to Coos Bay.

The fine against MasTec Inc. is the highest penalty issued this year by the state Department of Environmental Quality and one of the 10 highest penalties on record. The $51,000-fine against the Coos County Board of Commissioners, including John Griffith, Nikki Whitty and Gordon Ross, was the fifth-largest penalty issued this year.

"We had a long history of trying to get this project in compliance with the law, and we were unable to do so," said Les Carlough, a senior policy administrator with the DEQ. "There were quite a few violations, and they didn't have to happen if the county and the company had done what the permit and their lawful obligations required them to do."

Both MasTec and the county have appealed the fines. MasTec officials did not return telephone calls made late in the day for comment.

"We're going to request an informal and a formal hearing and will try to present a good case that we tried to give notice to MasTec to comply with the permits ..." Whitty said. "I think we can demonstrate to DEQ when we have the hearing that we tried to get MasTec to comply and I think DEQ and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will take that into consideration."

In a written statement, Coos County commissioners also disputed some of the state's specific allegations.

"We didn't do anything to harm the environment," county attorney Jay Waldron said in an interview.

The county has since fired MasTec and hired Rockford Corp., of North Plains, to correct violations and complete the work, which commissioners say is nearing completion.

"Rockford is doing a lot of ground work on this too," Commissioner Ross said this morning.

As to the fines, Ross said the county has asked for an informal hearing.

"We anticipate that those will moderate considerably," he said.

The $51 million pipeline, funded by state lottery dollars and property tax bonds approved by voters in 1999, will supply the largest population center in the western United States still without natural gas.

Last year, the state issued an $11,400 fine against MasTec after its crews ruptured several streambeds while attempting to drill beneath them, spilling a thick clay-based substance called bentonite into sensitive fish-spawning habitat. The company's appeal of that fine is still pending.

The latest penalties stem from MasTec's failure to protect streams from erosion, particularly along the East Fork of the Coquille River where crews buried pipe beneath the Coos Bay Wagon Road.

The county fired MasTec in April after the two sides failed to resolve differences about who was responsible for the project's environmental damage.

The company had worked on the project since last summer, when it was selected after underbidding competitors by $4 million on the $23 million construction portion of the job. Almost immediately, citizen complaints started coming in to state and federal regulators, who issued several verbal and written warnings to the county and MasTec.