Borough cites company for dumping

PALMER — Three test holes dug on the site of a controversial planned private dump led its owner being cited last week.

“I walked up to the site (and) I found some of the screened fines kind of sticking out from under the sand layer,” said Mark Whisenhunt, a code compliance officer with the Mat-Su Borough. “I went ahead and dug three test holes and about 12 to 14 inches down I did find the screened fine material down there.”

Screened fine materials? What’s that exactly?

“Shredded material — wood, fiber, insulation, some metal stuff, glass is what I specifically found in the hole,” Whisenhunt said.

He said previous inspections of the property found household garbage like Cheetos bags and juice bottles, but he found none of that during his inspection Thursday, just the shredded building materials.

The order the borough issued May 2 gives the property owner — Central Monofill Services — five days to remove the materials it dumped there. Since Whisenhunt’s Thursday inspection was past that deadline, he said, the borough issued three citations.

The first was for failing to comply with the order. The second was for dumping trash that created a public nuisance. And the third was for operating a junkyard without a permit.

Whisenhunt said the borough is formulating a plan for what to do next.

Neighbors near the Glenn Highway site just south of Palmer say the operation just showed up without any notice and with none of the required permits. They say they worry about what’s going to go into the landfill and whether that material will blow onto nearby properties, or if it will harm property values.

Neighbors also have voiced concerns about the water table. The site is a former gravel pit, one that drew attention from the borough and the state when it appeared that work on the site had changed water levels in nearby lakes.

Shane Durand, the man in charge of the operation for CMS, said the landfill will not contain anything hazardous or toxic and will not contaminate the water table.

What will go in the pit — if permitted by the borough and DEC — is ground-up building materials, including asbestos. The company specializes in recycling demolished buildings or scraps from new construction, Durand said. Some of those materials are ground up for mulch or repurposed in other ways. Useable materials like doors and windows would be re-sold, he said.

The gravel pit would house the remainder of the materials with the goal of eventually re-vegetating the site and reclaiming it into a field of some sort. Durand said he thinks the Valley could benefit from his business.

Durand denies dumping on the site without a permit, saying that the company had moved materials out there but not to dump them. Instead, it had moved a building out to put up as a shop on site, was chopping up clean wood to use as mulch and was experimenting with mixing material with dirt as a possible disposal method.

“We were doing things that we feel are not part of the disposal landfill but people see us out there doing things and automatically jump to the conclusion that we’re dumping stuff,” Durand said in a previous interview.

The company will host a pair of meetings at 4 p.m., and 6 p.m., Tuesday at the Palmer Train Depot to go over its plans with the community.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.