DUMP NO MORE

SUTTON — It’s amazing what you can find in a trash pile — a mattress that has rotted down to the springs, a dozen or more tires, 30-year-old soda cans, a jumble of rusted wires that may well have once been a crab pot.

All of these were among the tons and tons of garbage piled on a hill near mile 1.5 Jonesville Mine Road. Organizers weren’t sure how much trash fit in each of 10 dumpster loads carted off to the landfill in the three-day clean-up effort. Estimates for how much trash was pulled of the hill range from 80 to 100 tons.

Usibelli Coal Mine, the Chickaloon Village Traditional Council, a contingent from the Alaska National Guard, the Alaska Extreme Fourwheelers club, the Sutton Community Council, Cruz Construction and a handful of other groups showed up Saturday to clean up the illegal dumpsite.

Volunteers armed with rakes and white trash bags combed the hillside. The trash piled at the bottom was loaded into a front-end loader and dropped into the dumpster. Shortly after 2 p.m., Robert Brown with Usibelli Coal Mine said it looked to him like they were running out of space in their four dumpsters.

George Rauscher, chair of the Sutton Community Council, said people have been dumping there for years, at least as far back as the ’80s. It was a landfill, sort of, until the borough switched to the containerized transit-center system. The dumping kind of tapered off and all but stopped over the past couple decades. Until recently.

“There was a lot of dumping going on in the past year or two up here,” Rauscher said. “Which made a bright fresh-looking pile of white bags and diapers.”

It was that pile that a guy out riding his dirt bike came across this summer. Jessica Winnestaffer, who works with the Chickaloon council and was helping with the cleanup Saturday, said she thought the video hit the web sometime in June.

After that, Rauscher said, the video hit the news on KTUU and everyone starting paying attention. He went to the state, which told him that even though the site is on state land, it’s not something the state could clean up. If they cleaned up one dumpsite, state officials told him, they’d have to clean them all up.

So he tried to see if maybe he could get a better price than the $40,000 he was initially quoted. He worked that down to $8,000 but the state didn’t budge. At one point, Mat-Su Borough offered to pay for it, Rauscher said, but he didn’t think it right to saddle borough taxpayers with that cost.

But he was happy to accept an offer to waive the dumping fees when the trash reached the borough’s landfill. And, he said, Sutton resident and borough Assemblywoman Lynne Woods was instrumental in getting the effort off the ground. Rauscher is running against Bruce Walden, Warren Keogh and James Tapley to fill Woods’ assembly seat since Woods has reached her term limits.

He needed a sponsor. Eventually, a sponsor came to him in the form of Usibelli Coal Mine.

Usibelli Spokeswoman Lorali Carter said the day she saw the dumpsite reported on KTUU she thought, “that would be really great, if we could help with that.”

Her boss, Brown, who is the Wishbone Hill project manager, apparently saw the same report and had the same thought — he pitched it to her the next morning, beating her to the punch. So they started working to put something together.

Carter said all the other organizations that jumped on board did so without hesitation. The four-wheeler club, she said, does this kind of work in the Valley every summer and their heavy duty trucks were very helpful pulling junked vehicles out of the trash pile. There were enough of them in various states of decay to fill two of those dumpsters, she said.

She also had great things to say about Cruz Construction and the National Guard, who brought a great attitude and can-do spirit to the project.

It was also great to see the Chickaloon council jump on board, Carter said, because the council has expressed concern over and opposition to the coal mine Usibelli is considering for nearby Wishbone Hill. That people can put aside their differences is heartening, she said. And she was glad her company got a chance to prove it does more than just talk about being good stewards of the land.

“This is an example of business being good neighbors,” she said. “It’s not our garbage. It’s not even on our property. But we want to do the right thing.”

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