Wrangling Over Landfill Cap Could Be Over County Expected To Sign Department Of Ecology Plan

After arguing for years that there is no need to cap the former Greenacres Landfill, Spokane County is poised to do just that.

The Spokane Valley project will cost $5 million, with much of the money coming from state taxpayers. That doesn’t include the county’s cost of monitoring the landfill for up to 20 years.

The landfill, south of Interstate 90 near the Liberty Lake exit, closed 25 years ago.

After meeting with attorneys in private last week, county commissioners today are expected to sign a closure plan approved by the state Department of Ecology. That would end seven years of wrangling with the state agency, which will pay half the cleanup cost, up to $2.5 million.

The county’s insurance company also would pay a share. The rest would come from the county itself, partly from a pool of money collected from companies that dumped at Greenacres and other county landfills, said county utilities director Bruce Rawls.

The agreement does not end debate over whether the project is needed.

“Our opinion of the necessity to cap the landfill hasn’t changed. I don’t think their opinion (that the cap isn’t necessary) has changed either,” said Bill Fees of the Ecology Department’s Spokane office.

The cap is meant to keep rainwater from reaching the buried garbage and carrying contaminants to the aquifer.

Caps, which also were used at the county’s former Mica and North Side landfills, include a layer of sand topped with a layer of fabric and plastic. That’s topped with another layer of sand, then topsoil, grasses and wildflowers.

“The contaminants that are coming out of that landfill are almost undetectable,” said Rawls. “Our main contention has always been that there was no threat to human health or the environment.”

Rawls said the county is ready to sign the agreement to end the threat of state legal action that could have cost $15 million. County officials wanted the matter settled soon, because a land company is developing 640 lots on land surrounding the 40-acre landfill.

“We need to be good neighbors,” Rawls said.

Valley residents and industries began dumping at the hillside site in the 1940s. The private owners deeded it to the Greenacres township in the 1950s, and Spokane County took it over in 1967, five years before it closed.

The landfill was added to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund list in 1984.

The landfill belongs to the Liberty Lake Land Co., which is developing the surrounding Highlands Estates subdivision. But as the last operator of the landfill, the county is responsible for cleanup.

The county studied the landfill from 1987 until 1990 before deciding that a cap wasn’t necessary. Instead, the county proposed pumping and treating water from the landfill, which would have cost $500,000 to $2 million.

The Ecology Department disagreed, and in 1994 ordered the county to cap the landfill by 1998.

If the county doesn’t comply, Fees said, the state can do the work itself and charge the county three times the cost. That likely would lead to a court battle.

Rawls said the county will also capture and treat methane gas, which is generated when trash decomposes.

“This landfill’s been closed for such a long time that we really don’t anticipate very much gas coming out of it,” he said.

The Superfund site will be off-limits to the public until water draining from it no longer exceeds state limits for contamination, a process that could take 20 years, Rawls said.

After that, Rawls said, the Highlands homeowners’ association will take control of the landfill, “and they can use it for open space, for bird watching or whatever they want to do with it.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Graphic: Greenacres Landfill to be capped?