It took them long enough.
Last September 5, the state Department of Health and the Maui County Department of Public Works and Environmental Management signed settlement agreements requiring the county to resolve violations at the Lana`i and Central Maui landfills and pay penalties totaling $281,625 (although that number was reduced by $141,000 in exchange for specified environmental projects by the county).
By the time the agreements were signed, many of the violations had already been cured. For example, the agreement required the county to obtain a solid waste permit before operating phase IV of the Central Maui Landfill. That permit was issued nine months earlier.
Maui’s solid waste chief, Tracy Takamine, who came on board in 2005, doesn’t know why it took the state and county so long to complete their negotiations. The DOH’s Lene Ichinostubo can’t say either, but admits, “They were going back and forth way too long.”
Central Maui
The Central Maui Landfill is in transition. In January 2006, the state Department of Health finally issued a permit to the county for the landfill’s phase IV-A, which allowed the county to complete the long-overdue closure of phases I and II. Anticipating the new permit, the county had started closing the landfill in December 2005.
According to Takamine, the county has spent more than $7 million closing phases I and II, and is “99 percent complete.”
Even so, on September 5, 2006, the DOH and the county signed a settlement agreement to resolve issues, nearly all of which had been moot for some time.
The agreement centers on violations at phases I an II of the Central Maui Landfill that were documented more than six years earlier, in December 1999. An inspection by DOH staff had found that daily cover wasn’t being placed on the work face; no management plan existed to deal with the flies, rats, and dogs that plagued the site; no stormwater management system was in place nor any screening system for hazardous waste. Also, windblown litter was a problem, and the county had failed to notify the DOH of its noncompliance.
At the same time, the county had begun construction on phase IV of the landfill without a permit from the DOH. In February 1999, the DOH wrote the county that the construction violated the department’s administrative rules. Municipal solid waste landfills must have all designs and lateral expansions be approved by the DOH’s director before construction.
For violations at the Lana`i landfill and at Maui’s phases I, II, and IV, the county agreed to pay $200,000.
However, the agreement allowed the county to knock $100,000 off of that fine by doing one or more of the following: 1) provide financing for a year’s worth of state inspections; 2) promote environmental compliance by, for example, planting roadside hedges for litter control and aesthetic purposes; 3) identify and document all closed public, private, agricultural and military disposal sites in Maui County; or 4) undertake other projects with the department’s approval.
According to Takamine, the county paid the $100,000 and opted to landscape the landfill entrance.
Lana`i
The island of Lana`i has few residents and its landfill receives a mere 2,500 tons of garbage a year. Still, it’s had its problems. On March 7, 2001, Gary Gill, then-deputy director for the state Department of Health’s Environmental Health division, sent a warning letter to David Goode, director of Maui County’s Department of Public Works and Waste Management, about solid waste violations at the Lana`i landfill. Inspections by the DOH in November and December 2000 uncovered several permit violations:
- Inadequate daily cover over multiple days;
- Flies and odor problems;
- Failure to manage stormwater;
- Failure to control windblown litter;
- Failure to report noncompliance with permit conditions;
- No all-weather access road to work the face of the landfill;
- Potential fire hazard due to large areas of exposed waste over multiple days and no mitigative measures such as water, trucks, soil piles,
- Acceptance of liquids in bulk or non-containerized waste;
- Failure to have on the premises a copy of the permit.
Gill’s letter was a notice of the DOH’s intent to issue a formal notice of violation. Although the DOH has the ability to impose fines of up to $10,000 per offense per day, it has often been more interested in obtaining compliance rather than imposing penalties. To help the county avoid a large fine, Gill suggested that Goode might want to enter into a consent agreement with the DOH that would require the county to commit to fixing the violations and pay a negotiated penalty. This kind of agreement, Gill stated, was only available to landfill operators who immediately correct their violations.
The following month, Goode responded that he wished to enter into a consent agreement, and on May 16, he detailed everything the county had done to bring the landfill into compliance: It had ironed out problems with its daily cover hauler to ensure the regular delivery of material, it had shipped four litter screens to the island for litter control, and it promised that all landfill employees would be familiar with the landfill’s operations manual, among other things.
On August 27, the DOH circulated a draft consent agreement that would have imposed a penalty of $114,250 ($58,000 for a supplemental environmental project and the remaining $56,250 to be paid to the state).
“If no written response is received, we will assume that the County fully agrees to the terms of the Consent Agreement and a finalized copy will be sent,” Gill wrote.
Although the agreement was never signed, the DOH did not finalize the agreement. Over the next few years, the county apparently continued to violate its permit and on September 1, 2004, the DOH prepared to issue a Notice of Violation and Order for violations similar to those identified in late 2000. In addition, DOH inspectors found that the landfill was accepting green waste, white goods, and scrap automobiles, all of which are not allowed.
On October 1, 2004, the DOH issued a Notice and Finding of Violation and Order against the county, which included a fine of $81,625.
Instead of paying the fine, the DOH and the county signed a settlement agreement on September 5, 2006, which allowed the violations to be resolved without any admission of guilt by the county. If the county bought a bulldozer for the landfill by December 2006, it would not have to pay any fine. If it failed to do so, it would have to spend $41,000 on a supplemental environmental project and pay a fine of $41,000 to the DOH.
Takamine says the county managed to get its $41,000 fine waived conducted a one-day metals cleanup as the supplemental project.
— Teresa Dawson
Volume 18, Number 1 July 2007
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