Neighbors have their fill

PALMER — Having seen a renewed permit application filed earlier this year, neighbors wary of a proposed dump for construction debris say they’re still not convinced their concerns have been addressed.

“They’re taking advantage of the junkyard/refuse ordinance,” said Zennon McNeill, president of the Gateway Community Council, which represents the area containing a decommissioned gravel pit that Central Monofill Services hopes to get permitted to operate as a dump for construction waste.

He said the Mat-Su Borough’s regulations would let the company operate a dump with much fewer regulations than its own central landfill.

Central Monofill sees itself as a recycling company, selling whatever building materials it can and crushing up and disposing of the rest. Company officials say they kept 50,000 tons of trash out of landfills last year.

The fight is over what to do with the remainder — mostly ground up wood and Sheetrock, but also asbestos — and CMS says that putting it in a landfill is just not cost effective. Nor is trucking it to some far-off dumpsite. The company says it needs a site close to where buildings are being torn down. In addition to the Palmer site, it is working on permitting one in Chugiak, which neighbors also have opposed.

Neighbors of the Palmer site off the Glenn Highway east of the highway’s interchange with the Parks Highway say that the area CMS wants to use is much too sensitive. There’s a punctured aquifer there and trash would be too near to the water table. McNeill said he’s seen CMS’s latest permit and the hydrology report saying it won’t seep into groundwater but he doesn’t believe it.

Nor is McNeill convinced he said that the monitoring wells CMS has installed will be any help. His neighbors point out that by the time the wells detect anything, the water table would already be polluted.

The site has already landed in court where a district court judge found CMS and one of its owners, Shane Durand, guilty of dumping without a borough permit. At the time, CMS said it wasn’t dumping, that it had moved out a building the company intended to reassemble onsite. It was mulching up wood and mixing ground-up debris with dirt to see if that would be a good 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 at the time.

But the Mat-Su Borough said it found illegally dumped trash in multiple test holes drilled on site. Whatever CMS’s explanation was in court, it didn’t convince Judge John Wolfe, who ordered the site cleaned up. The company has since filed and appeal.

McNeill said his neighbors counted 10 to 15 trucks running material out of there after the cleanup order. He said the that effort took four days, which, given that each truck can hold 20 tons, would mean that thousands of tons of debris was removed.

Durand said on a tour of the site that allegations he’d been dumping were unfounded. He said neighbors had accused him of all sorts of things, including running trucks in the middle of the night.

McNeill and his neighbors provided the Frontiersman with about 300 photos, mostly aerial shots of the site. None of them contain a smoking gun with evidence of tons of debris going into the site, though many do show the wood chipping operation underway and heavy equipment moving what could have been debris, but could just as likely have been dirt. Durand has said he did do some work smoothing out a spot that had been collecting water.

The company has long held that what it intends to dump is not harmful. It has pointed out that people live inside homes built from this stuff.

“These are all the same products in your house you’re exposed to,” Durand said during that tour earlier this year. “And now once I put them in the ground they’re toxic?”

McNeill and his neighbors would ask a different question. What if you ground up a house and put the result in a sifter and poured water through it. Would you drink what came out the bottom?

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