Neighbor decries ‘landfill’

WASILLA — About a half dozen cars, four shipping containers, a double-wide trailer, and several semi-trailers line a small forested property along Ruth Drive.

There are also bags of fiber glass insulation, wooden eaves of houses, coiled fire hoses, discarded pumps used to apply various chemicals, strips of carpet, and an old bright-orange road worker safety vest and as several containers full of heating oil on a plastic tarp.

Neighbors say it amounts to an unlicensed, unregulated landfill in the middle of a quiet residential neighborhood off of Seward Meridian. The property owner says it’s a temporary storage facility slated for relocation to different borough property, as soon as arrangements can be made.

Borough and state officials say that while the site is something of an eyesore, the site doesn’t pose an environmental risk, and isn’t a nuisance, and there is little they can do.

Wendy Hale lives next door, and said she’s reported the property to both the Department of Environmental Conservation and the Mat-Su Borough, only to be told that most of the things she finds worrisome about the site are within borough regulations.

“There’s a lot of animals that travel through here, and strange people,” she said. “A lot of this stuff is just rotting away. Nobody wants this stuff.”

Some of the things she and other neighbors have complained about have been handled Hale said. For example, winds blew the top off the double-wide some months back, and insulation began to float across the neighborhood in glassy yellow strands, accumulating on lawns and generally making a nuisance of itself, Hale said.

“You know what the wind blows like out here,” she said. “That stuff was just blowing all over.”

Borough officials responded, the fiberglass got cleaned up and placed in containment, but a lot of stuff was left behind.

Those shipping containers, for example, and the rusting cars and trucks, and the oil drums, though the property owner has taken steps to move them to a structure he’s constructed on-site.

The borough will still make sure the unoccupied house on the property is boarded up, and any stray trash — including the last of the insulation, will be picked up. Beyond that, the borough’s hands are tied, according to Mat-Su Borough Ordinance Enforcement officer Pam Ness.

“If he wants to offer his property for people to store stuff on — as long as it’s not outside and it’s not blowing all over and it’s not considered junk — he could fill up the entire property, she said. “For the shipping container, he can open it up and just pitch it inside, and we have no say about what goes in there.”

Asked if the site was a dump, property owner Gene Brooks, who lives in Anchorage, chuckled. He said he’s familiar with complaints about the property.

“It’s not a dump, it’s a storage area,” he said.

“It’s my intention to get it moved out of there in the next year or two,” Brooks said. “I’d like to develop that property, and here again, I don’t have the money to do it. In order to develop that property into anything, to be used as a residential site or whatever, I need to be able to get that stuff off of there.”

The owners were in negotiations to buy a different piece of property in the borough, he said. Brooks said he didn’t want to cause problems with the neighbors, and that he’s generally tried to respond to any enforcement issues about the property. The trailer was intended to be a salvage job, until the roof was damaged, Brooks said.

“I feel bad,” he said. “I’m not the kind of citizen that likes to make trouble with neighbors. Things just kind of evolved there over time.

“The bottom line is, I’m trying to get it cleaned up within my means.”

Contact Brian O’Connor at 352-2269, brian.oconnor@frontiersman.com, or on Twitter @reporterbriano.