Settlement Near In Lawsuit Over Landfill Cleanup

Spokane County commissioners will decide today whether to accept an insurance company’s $3 million offer to settle a lawsuit over Colbert landfill pollution.

A federal jury trial on Colbert was halted Monday after attorneys for Spokane County and Twin City Fire Insurance Co. said they wanted to settle.

Two similar trials involving the Mica and Greenacres landfills also will be canceled. They were scheduled later this year.

The settlement offer is the last with the county’s insurers. It will pay only a small portion of the remaining $38 million landfill cleanup tab - leaving millions more to be raised through garbage rate hikes or taxes.

Several other insurance companies that sold policies before Colbert became a Superfund site already have settled with the county for $5.5 million.

About 75 percent of the $3 million will go to Colbert and the rest to pay part of the cost of the county’s other leaking landfills, according to the agreement.

Spokane County has already spent $11 million to clean up contaminated ground water at Colbert, which was placed on the federal Superfund list of toxic cleanup sites in 1983.

The county faces $10.25 million more in costs that cannot be recovered from grants or insurance.

The Colbert compromise was reached after several days of testimony in U.S. District Judge William F. Nielsen’s courtroom. The trial started on May 3.

Spokane County’s lawyers tried to convince the jury that county officials didn’t know for sure the landfill was the source of chemical contamination in neighbors’ drinking water wells until 1982 - when Twin City’s $25 million comprehensive general liability policy was in effect.

George Maddox, an engineer and the county’s lead expert, said he finally concluded the landfill was causing the pollution in April 1982.

Twin City’s attorneys presented witnesses - including an angry neighbor whose well was contaminated in 1980 - who said the county should have known much earlier the landfill was causing the pollution.

Neither side had a perfect case, and both realized they could “lose big” before the jury, said Frank Conklin, the county’s lead attorney.

“Spokane County could have received nothing, and Twin City could have been held liable for a good deal of money,” Conklin said.

“Considering the evidence, we decided a compromise was in everybody’s best interest,” said Dean Lum of Seattle, lead attorney for Twin City.

If the trial proceeded and the jury decided Twin City was liable, a second phase of the trial would have established actual damages.

That phase could have posed major problems for the county, Conklin said.

Twin City’s 1982 policy covered only one of the 18 years the county operated the sanitary landfill at Colbert, and the company was arguing it was responsible for only 1/18th the damage.

In addition, the insurer was claiming responsibility for only 1/30th the damage from an old township dump that operated for 30 years before the Colbert “sanitary” landfill opened in 1968.

Twin City would have claimed it was only responsible for $55,000 for every $1 million in damages from the Colbert landfill - and only $20,000 per million from the old township dump, Conklin said.

The insurance company also was prepared to argue it was responsible only for Colbert water contaminated during 1982 - a fraction of the water that has to be cleaned up.

“Even if Twin City had been found liable by a jury, the amount of the liability might not have been a great deal more than the settlement figure,” Conklin said.

Under a “best-case scenario,” Spokane County would have received $4.55 million, Conklin said.

The company would have made similar arguments for Greenacres and Mica.

The main industrial polluters at Colbert - including keyboard manufacturer Key Tronic Corp. and the U.S. Air Force - have paid $7.5 million into a cleanup trust fund.

An air stripper built last year has cleaned 242 million gallons of polluted groundwater.