Coalition Fights West Plains Landfill Plan Steel Foundry Wants To Bury Waste In Area Zoned For Agriculture

Alex Biggs has put up with illegally dumped truckloads of chicken manure, two businesses with tires stacked like firewood, a gravel pit, a questionable dumping site and the smell of compost.

Now Biggs and other members of the Whitebluff Prairie Coalition are fighting another industrial site: a proposed landfill on the West Plains to be used by a steel foundry.

“Why is this area becoming the city’s dump?” asked Biggs, who with her husband owns 40 acres about two miles north of the proposed landfill. “We find ourselves in a hearing every other month.”

The businesses fall within a 1 1/2-square-mile area zoned for general agriculture.

The proposed landfill is on the west side of Burlington Northern railroad tracks just north of Deno Road. Spokane Industries, which operates a steel foundry that makes steel castings, wants to fill the land’s natural depressions with its used molding sand and furnace slag.

Spokane Industries plans to fill in about 15 acres of the 22-acre site with the material, treated with clay and water and containing trace amounts of chromium. The company plans to make at most two dumps a weekday and level off the depressions in about 32 years.

County zoning adjustor Thomas Mosher approved a permit for the landfill, but residents of the area appealed the decision. A hearing will be held May 17 before the county Board of Adjustment.

The landfills also face an environmental review by the county Health Department, but that process will wait until after the zoning issue is settled.

“It’s been dragging along at a snail’s pace,” said Greg Tenold, president of Spokane Industries, which obtained an option to buy the land at the end of 1993. “We have to go through all of the environmental procedures. I’m sure we’ll have a whole series of hearings. By the time we get done, it should be state-of-the-art and clean as can be.”

The company has been paying to dump its material at a licensed landfill near Fairchild Air Force Base.

Spokane Industries decided to build its own landfill because it wants to make sure that it’s not held responsible for problems connected to other material put in the landfill, Chairman Bob Tenold said.

In addition, there’s the issue of cost.

“We have to determine how much rates might raise in the future, the cost of any cleanup operation,” Greg Tenold said. “We see that the cost of landfilling in the future would continue to rise.”

The Tenolds will have to balance that cost with the cost of installing a new landfill. Already Spokane Industries must line the landfills and install a security fence. It still faces a review to determine whether the site contains wetlands or is over the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed sole-source aquifer.

To residents, there will never be enough protection. They worry about added traffic, about sand blowing off the landfills and about contaminated ground water.

Sherrie Swanson owns about 20 acres about 1 1/4 miles northeast of the proposed landfill. Her father, Gerald McCoury, owns an 800-acre parcel that touches the proposed landfill site.

“I see it as a major health issue - the water and the dust,” Swanson said. “We get good winds out here from the southwest. It’s going to carry the dust straight to my house.”

The residents also complain that the company’s registered agent, Dwight Hume, has sat on the Board of Adjustment. Hume said company representatives hired him when they acquired rights to the land to steer them through the conditional use permit process. He denied any conflict.

“I’m not on (the board) anymore,” Hume said. “The last time was December. My term was up, and I didn’t seek reappointment.”

As Biggs drove to the proposed landfill recently, she stopped at other industrial sites. At one point, she pulled out binoculars to look at a dumping area on a hillside where a school bus and large trucks were parked amid the trees.

Down the road, she slowed in front of the bulldozers at a compost site and two giant tire piles across the road from each other.

“We feel it destroys the quality of our life,” Biggs said of the various land uses. “It was getting to be a rural area, but now they’re trying to make it industrial. These are dump industries. These are waste industries.”

Planner Mosher said he sympathized with the neighbors’ concerns about all the industry in a general agriculture zone. A possible solution would be to limit the number of industrial permits in a certain area, he said.

“It bothers me as a planner and as a decision-maker,” Mosher said. “It feeds on itself. The more rough uses out there, the easier it is to approve the next one. I sit there as a zoning adjustor with no legal way to tie them together and say, ‘Enough is enough.”’