Monofill fight in court

PALMER — The fight over a plan for a disposal site for construction material is steadily making its way through court.

Currently, six citations issued against Central Monofill Services and Shane Durand, the company’s project manager for the Palmer monofill site, are sitting in the state court of appeals, which, according to its online case tracking tool, is awaiting delivery of transcripts from the trial.

The case relates to a decommissioned gravel pit in a neighborhood south of Palmer on the west side of the Glenn Highway. Central Monofill proposes to fill the pit in with crushed up building materials and also use land there as a place to sell salvaged material. CMS is in the building salvage business, recycling everything it can from demolished buildings. The monofill is for materials not commercially salable.

Neighbors don’t like the idea, saying trash has already blown over their properties from the operation, that the fill is little more than garbage and that a punctured aquifer on the property — which caused changes in the levels of nearby lakes — is a clear path to contamination of their drinking water.

The trial appealed to the higher court happened over the course of three days spread out between June and July before District Court Judge John Wolfe.

It all stemmed from citations the Mat-Su Borough issued in May. The charges included operating a junkyard without a permit, failure to comply with a borough order to clean up the garbage and having junk or trash that caused a public nuisance.

The officer that wrote the tickets, Mark Whisenhunt, made brief comments on each ticket.

“Observed junk and/or trash disposed of and/or scattered upon property,” he wrote on one. “Observed junkyard, refuse area activity on property,” read another.

The borough, essentially, said that the company should have had a permit before it started dumping in Palmer and ordered that the material the company brought in be removed from the site.

Meanwhile, the borough’s planning commission declined to give CMS a permit to open up the disposal site.

As for CMS, the company has said in the past that it was not dumping, but instead brought some material out to experiment with mixing it with dirt. In its appeal, it says that the borough didn’t prove the trash was a nuisance, that the material hadn’t been “disposed of” and that it wasn’t trash.

“Since the ‘cover material’ is not ‘trash,’ appellants were not in violation of the enforcement order,” according to the appeal.

In addition to the Palmer site, CMS is simultaneously working through the process of getting a site approved for the same type of dumping in Chugiak.

A similarly vocal group of neighbors there have aligned against CMS, making up signs and banners.

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