The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette has an editorial today titled "A landfill legacy." It is accompanied by a photo, with this caption:
Adams Center Landfill still accepted hazardous waste when this photo was taken in 1995. The landfill closed in 1998, but testing for water contamination around the site must continue for decades.And that, according to the editorial itself, is the problem. Some quotes:
The Allen County commissioners desperately need to tighten their oversight of the county’s hazardous waste tax fund, which has lost its main source of revenue. Timely action is imperative to fulfill the fund’s primary intent of paying to test for water contamination around Adams Center Landfill.Posted by Marcia Oddi at November 24, 2004 09:33 AMIf county officials do not act, the fund will run dry, possibly threatening the future of the monitoring – a government function that must continue for decades. * * *
The seemingly unrelated issues of the landfill and billing for hazmat spills have their common origin in a 1981 law that levied a tax on hazardous waste disposed at Adams Center Landfill. The law established the county’s hazardous waste fund, financing it with 25 percent of the revenue from the landfill tax. The rest went to the state. At the time, the landfill was outside city limits, so county government had jurisdiction.
Subsequent state law allowed public safety agencies to bill businesses for hazardous waste incidents. The county’s Emergency Management Agency assumed that billing responsibility for both the city and the county’s other fire departments. Officials placed those revenues into the same hazardous waste fund, a questionable co-mingling.
The 1981 law permits the commissioners to use the fund for hazmat training and equipment. But the law’s first listed use of the fund is “establishing monitoring wells on land near” the landfill; the second is “analyzing samples from the monitoring wells”; and the third is “Conducting other types of testing and surveillance for hazardous waste contamination of land near the disposal facility.”
Burrus said the county has seven wells around the landfill; an eighth well is in disrepair, he said. The county contracts with a private lab in Muncie to test the wells, but hasn’t done so in about four or five years, he said. Each round of tests costs about $60,000 to $100,000, he said, and no contamination has been detected. More frequent testing would occur if contaminants were detected, Burrus said.
The landfill tax generated hundreds of thousands of dollars a year but became defunct with the landfill’s 1998 closing. The hazardous waste fund once had a balance of $7 million. Its balance on Sept. 30 was $2.66 million, the county treasurer’s office reports.
Fortunately, the public relies on more than the county’s tests to monitor for leakage from the state’s only commercial hazardous waste landfill. The Indiana Department of Environmental Management requires the landfill’s owner, Waste Management, to test groundwater and send the results to IDEM for analysis. IDEM also conducts on-site inspections. How much these tests overlap with the county is unclear, but it is the county that is specifically responsible for testing outside the landfill property.
For the short term, the county commissioners must immediately take control of the fund. They should freeze all but the most vital spending. They should consider establishing a separate fund for hazmat spill billing and spending and dedicate most or all of the existing fund toward the landfill monitoring. They should involve city officials because the landfill is now in the city and because the city operates the county’s principal hazmat unit.
For the long term, city and county officials need to work with IDEM, state legislators and landfill owner Waste Management to develop a long-term plan to monitor groundwater surrounding the landfill for contaminants. The landfill’s closing has in many ways rendered the 1981 law obsolete. New strategies for sharing the financing of the long-term monitoring may well be in order.