It’s no secret that the state Department of Health usually settles fines for far lower than the amount originally proposed. The recently concluded violation case regarding O`ahu’s Waimanalo Gulch Sanitary Landfill is no exception.
Last May, the DOH fined the City and County of Honolulu and landfill operator Waste Management Hawai`i, Inc., $424,000 for several violations of their solid waste permit. The Notice of Violation and Decision and Order addressed the company’s failure to construct portions of the landfill in accordance with approved designs and to report those failures to the department in a timely manner.
In fact, the company submitted the required report only after the department threatened to withhold renewal of its solid waste permit.
Waste Management, joined by the city, quickly requested a contested case hearing, and according to company general manager Joseph Whelan, a hearing had been tentatively scheduled for some time last November.
By early December, the parties had reached a compromise. In a seven-page settlement agreement signed on December 3, WMH consented to pay a penalty of $100,000 within 20 days and face fines of $1,000 a day for each day the fine went unpaid after the deadline.
Signed by then-department head Chiyome Fukino and WMH vice president Robert Longo, the agreement states, “[T]he DOH finds that this settlement is in the public interest.”
The department’s file on the case, when inspected by Environment Hawai`i last month, included no proof of payment, but according to the Solid and Hazardous Waste Branch, it received payment from Waste Management on December 17.
What arguments Waste Management made to persuade the department to shrink its proposed fine by more than 75 percent is a mystery, since the case file provided to Environment Hawai`i contained only a copy of the notice of violation, the settlement agreement and two newspaper clippings about the violations. The file did not even include the May 25 letters from Waste Management’s attorneys and city counsel requesting a contested case hearing.
This is not the first time the department and Waste Management have settled for a greatly reduced fine. In January 2006, the DOH fined Waste Management $2.8 million for 18 violations of its solid waste permit, but ended up settling for $1.5 million in a settlement agreement reached in December 2007.
–Teresa Dawson
Volume 21 Number 8, March 2011
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