Trash Clash: Put A Lid On It, Board Orders Bureaucrats Feuding About What Can Be Burned In City Incinerator

Spokane elected officials have told two feuding bureaucrats to work out a legal agreement on what besides regular garbage can be burned in the city’s trash incinerator.

Anthony Grover, new regional director of the Washington Department of Ecology, will mediate closed-door meetings on the controversy - unresolved since 1994.

Eric Skelton, Spokane’s top air cop, says the tons of used pesticide jugs, oil filters and other industrial discards the city has tossed into the plant could increase toxins in Spokane’s air.

The Spokane County Air Pollution Control Authority can no longer guarantee the plant is meeting pollution limits because of the city’s action, Skelton said in a Aug. 22 letter to Ecology.

Phil Williams, the city’s engineering director, insists “special wastes” from Spokane, Canada and even Japan are acceptable, and clean-air regulators should butt out.

Ecology’s Claude Sappington, Grover’s predecessor, tried to mediate the dispute in 1994 and 1995, but the effort failed.

It’s time to quit fighting, members of a city-county liaison board overseeing the plant said Monday.

“We’d like this resolved - and not on the front page of the newspaper,” said Spokane County Commissioner John Roskelley.

In a Sept. 5 story, The Spokesman-Review reported that Spokane solid-waste officials had accepted soiled rags from a British Columbia diesel spill, reigniting the controversy that flared in 1994 when the city burned tons of used Canadian pesticide jugs in the incinerator.

At Monday’s meeting, Skelton told the liaison board that he sent his recent letter to Ecology because he was surprised that the city was still burning special wastes.

He was notified by Ecology, not Spokane’s solid-waste department.

“I was under the impression no special wastes were being generated,” Skelton said.

Williams said he’s continued to burn tons of oil filters and other discards - including “international garbage” that includes leftover sandwiches from Japan Air Lines flights between Tokyo and Moses Lake, where the airline trains some of its pilots.

“This is not an air-quality or a money issue. It’s really a waste-management issue. We feel strongly the current regulations are adequate,” Williams said.

But one city official questioned the policy.

“Maybe we shouldn’t be doing this at all,” said Spokane City Councilwoman Cherie Rodgers, a SCAPCA board member and clean-air activist.

If he has to submit detailed protocols to SCAPCA before accepting special wastes, it won’t be worth it to take them, Williams said.

There’s a broader issue at stake, Skelton said.

“I’m concerned with bringing in other waste (from) outside Spokane County. With things the way they are now, SCAPCA has no opportunity to provide input,” he said.

The meetings with Grover, a trained mediator, will begin this month or in early October. They will be confidential, and their goal is to forge a legally-binding agreement on what can be burned in the plant, said Grover in a Sept. 5 letter to SCAPCA and the city’s solid-waste department.

“To ensure legality, I will occasionally step away from the mediation table to obtain expert advice from Ecology staff or the attorney general’s office,” Grover said in the letter.

This time, the board won’t let things slide, Roskelley said.

“I’ve asked Tony to call me if things aren’t moving,” he said pointedly.

, DataTimes