Chef Menteur landfill testing called a farce

Opponents of a newly opened landfill in eastern New Orleans who persuaded Mayor Ray Nagin to shut the facility down two weeks ago so they could examine the waste being dumped there said Thursday that the testing procedure proposed by operators and government officials is a farce.

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In a joint news release, the Louisiana Environmental Action Network and the Citizens for a Strong New Orleans East said their experts, who include a former secretary of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, said the testing protocol proposed by the city, state and Waste Management of Louisiana "would be a useless waste of time." The proposal included testing debris piles yet to be brought to the landfill and viewing the landfill from the window of a bus, the groups said.

The news release also suggested, but did not say outright, that Nagin had ordered the temporary shutdown for political reasons, noting tartly that the controversial facility reopened Sunday, less than 24 hours after Nagin won re-election.

They "have told us this site is safe for the community, but they won't let anyone test the waste going in there to prove it," said the Rev. Vien Nguyen, pastor of Mary Queen of Vietnam Catholic Church and a leader of Citizens for a Strong New Orleans East.

Nagin fired back in a statement Thursday, saying no one in his administration promised to "prove" that toxic materials were being dumped at the landfill, only to test what was being placed there.

Marc Ehrhardt, a spokesman for Waste Management, which operates the landfill, confirmed that the landfill was reopened the day after Nagin's re-election. However, he said that after the landfill had been open for two days, Nagin asked that it be closed again, and the company agreed.

He said no new opening date has been set.

Chuck Carr Brown, assistant secretary for the DEQ, said he believes all parties had worked in good faith to come up with a testing method that everyone could live with.

 

The last straw

"We've all worked together from supposedly a cooperative standpoint, and we've all come to agreement on how we need to approach the testing," he said. "If they're choosing not to participate, we can't force them to participate."

While it's true that the various parties have had numerous meetings and conference calls to discuss how best to test the landfill, the parties have been at loggerheads about how the testing should be done.

Landfill opponents have maintained consistently that their experts need to be able to dig up a portion of the actual material that has been dumped at the landfill to characterize it accurately.

But city and state officials, along with those from Waste Management, have suggested various other approaches, such as testing random piles of debris around the city that are awaiting hauling. This week, they proposed that the experts' examination of the landfill itself be confined to viewing it from the window of a bus. That bus trip was scheduled for today.

That was the last straw for the opponents, and led to their rejection of the process Thursday.

The debate over the landfill, at 16600 Chef Menteur Highway, began raging even before it opened several weeks ago. Nagin played a key role in the site's opening, using his emergency authority in February to grant the operators a conditional-use permit.

Under an agreement signed at the same time, the city gets a 22 percent share of the landfill's revenue.

The landfill was given a state permit last month, and began accepting construction and demolition debris shortly afterward. Joel Waltzer, a lawyer for the Louisiana Environmental Action Network, filed a legal challenge to the permitting process, but a federal judge declined his request for an injunction.

About a week before the election, after a raucous protest at City Hall by landfill opponents, Nagin agreed to ask the facility's operators to close temporarily while the waste stream was tested.

 

Types of waste disputed

"If reports show that this material is toxic, we will shut it down" for good, Nagin promised, saying he wanted the community to be comfortable with the landfill.

Now, it's not clear whether, or how, that comfort level will be achieved.

The opponents' fears revolve around a couple of issues, including that the debris headed to the landfill is less benign than advertised. In part, that fear is driven by the state's expansion of what constitutes such debris in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a definition that now includes sofas, treated wood and asbestos-containing materials.

Landfill opponents also fear that with thousands of homes being torn down, trash haulers will have a difficult time sorting out the hazardous debris from the harmless, and that material more noxious than that allowed under the new, looser rules will wind up at Chef Menteur.

Ehrhardt said such fears are unfounded.

"This is the same type of waste being disposed of in a safe manner at more than 100 sites between Alabama and Texas, all of them under strict regulatory guidelines," he said.

State officials likewise point out that the material being taken to Chef Menteur is presumably similar in nature to that being brought to the other four construction landfills in southeast Louisiana.

However, the Louisiana Environmental Action Network and others who oppose the landfill say they have special concerns about Chef Menteur because its permit was granted after an expedited review, and because the landfill is adjacent to waterways as well as the Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge.

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Gordon Russell can be reached at grussell@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3347.