Sludge Watch ==> Kern Sludge Ban is Primed to Pass

[maureen.reilly at sympatico.ca]

Sludgewatch Admin:

Here is an update on the Kern County California proposed sludge ban.
Here is a comment I really can't let pass:

Diane Gilbert is a bureaucrat mouthpiece for the  Los Angeles Sanitation 
Bureau.
In this story she is quoted as saying "If we put it in bags,
we could sell it at the supermarket."

Well, Diane, I'd like to see you try to put it in bags and sell it.  No, 
really.
This is a gooey mixture (about as gooey as it goes into a toilet .. if you 
want to get
an idea of relative gooeyness) that has been heated or 'cooked' for a few 
hours....

If you don't get it plowed down quick it will become a bubbling gassy mass 
of decomposition....it would explode out of a plastic bag into a fecal mess 
that would send the health department running.

So Diane: Knock it off with this crap (as in Sir Thomas Crapper...inventor 
of the flush toilet) that you could bag this sludge your are sending to Kern 
and sell it in the supermarket.

Indeed, LA, why don't you do that: bag your gooey grey sludge and see how 
well it sits on the shelf.   Heck, if  Los Angeleans wanted to smear their 
wet fecal waste in their back yards, they could avoid the toilet altogether.

Diane, do you really think the people of Kern County are stupid?

.......................................................

www.latimes.com


Sludge Ban Is Primed to Pass

Strong support for the Kern County measure could force L.A. and others
in the state to find new areas to dump tons of treated human waste.

By Steve Chawkins, Times Staff Writer
May 2, 2006

BAKERSFIELD - It's a typical day at Green Acres: Rippling fields of
wheat await harvest, a cat scampers after field mice and workers unload
750 tons of processed human waste from Los Angeles, fertilizing a quiet
revolt in rural Kern County.

Fearful of deteriorating air and water quality, many folks in the New
Jersey-size county have about had it with the daily parade of trucks
dumping sewage sludge onto their fields. On top of that, they can't
stand what is viewed as Los Angeles' imperial attitude, such as recent
reports that social workers in Los Angeles County had given homeless
people one-way bus tickets to Bakersfield, the largest city in Kern
County.

In fact, many residents are simply sick of Los Angeles.

"People genuinely have the feeling that we've got a bully next door,
flinging garbage over his fence into our yard," said Paul Giboney, an
agronomist for a large family farm and a leading supporter of a proposed
sludge ban. "We're not treated with appropriate respect."

Come June 6, the relationship between dumper and dumpee could well
change. For the first time, Kern County voters will be asked to ban the
use of sewage sludge on farm fields - a watershed decision for a place
that takes in one-third of the state's sludge.

Los Angeles officials contend that Kern County residents are being
manipulated by a state senator who's pressing the initiative for
political gain. Their sludge is perfectly safe, they say, casting
themselves as victims of a campaign to cast the city as a sludge-spewing
predator.

Even so, the measure could encourage similar actions in other parts of
the sprawling San Joaquin Valley, said Carol Whiteside, director of the
Great Valley Center, a research organization in Modesto.

"The valley is home to every one of the 11 prisons built since 1990,"
she said. "We have waste-burners and tire-burners and proposals for even
more garbage. At some point, there's enough critical mass that people
say: 'No more. That's not our future.' "

Passage of Measure E, the so-called Keep Kern Clean initiative, seems to
be a sure bet - so much so that it stalled plans by a Missouri company
for a massive landfill that would bury millions of tons of Los Angeles
garbage in the wind-swept Kern County desert. Earlier this month,
backers pulled the plug on a November ballot proposition for the dump's
approval.

Even officials of Los Angeles - just one of numerous coastal cities that
trucks its sludge to farms throughout Kern County - concede that defeat
at the polls is a virtual certainty.

"There isn't anyone in the county who wants us to stay," said Joe
Mundine, an assistant director of the Los Angeles Bureau of Sanitation.
"There's no doubt that this will pass."

If it does, then Orange County, Los Angeles County, Oxnard and Ventura,
among others, will also be scrambling to find new places to dump sludge.

In the meantime, Kern County can expect a lawsuit challenging its right
to ban a widespread practice that has not been definitively linked to
any health problems, Mundine said.

Los Angeles owns Green Acres and believes a sludge ban would illegally
restrict the use of its property. "There's a huge investment here and
the city wants to protect it," Mundine added.

Bracing for a loss in June, the city has lined up farmers in Arizona
willing to use its sludge. The cost to taxpayers would increase from $7
million a year to as much as $21 million a year. No immediate fee
increase is expected, and officials say they don't know how much a
potential hike would be.

Orange County already trucks some sludge to Arizona and probably will
send more if the measure passes, said Layne Baroldi, an official with
the sanitation district that serves about 80% of the county's residents.
"It could cost us $700,000 a year, but the real story is the precedent
it could set," Baroldi said. "Who's to say that other challenges like it
won't metastasize from county to county?"

The Orange County district spreads nearly a third of its sludge on the
privately owned Honeybucket Farm, which recently was named "Agribusiness
of the Year" by the chamber of commerce in the Kern County town of
Delano.

Off Interstate 5 in the wide-open spaces 15 miles southwest of
Bakersfield, Green Acres is the final resting place for virtually all of
Los Angeles' treated sewage. The city, which has used the site since
1994, bought it for $9.3 million in 2000. It also spent about $40
million upgrading its treatment system to produce what is known as
"Class A" sludge.

The farm, at 4,688 acres, is roughly the size of Griffith Park. More
than two dozen tanker trucks roll through its gates every day, dumping
vast loads of dark muck, which are tilled into the soil within hours.
The farm's wheat, alfalfa and corn are sold to nearby dairies as feed.

Diane Gilbert, a spokeswoman for the city sanitation bureau, likens the
odor to the mild aroma of potting soil. Any bad smells the locals
complain about, she said, must come from other farms. On one recent
morning, the smell at Green Acres was a barely perceptible musty
presence.

The farm pours $8 million a year in wages and purchases into the local
economy, Gilbert said. The so-called biosolids have turned marginal
farmland into a productive parcel, complete with hundreds of sheep
grazing in the winter.

After more than two weeks of elaborate cleansing at the Hyperion
Treatment Plant in Playa del Rey, the sludge is about as benign as
sludge can get, officials said. "If we put it in bags," Gilbert said,
"we could sell it at the supermarket."


Alan B. Rubin, the Environmental Protection Agency's top scientist on
sewage sludge until he retired last year, vigorously defends spreading
it on fields - a practice that he said has proved safe over decades.

"Without a doubt, this is the most evaluated material at the EPA," said
Rubin, now a consultant for Responsible Biosolids Management, the Santa
Barbara firm that operates Green Acres for Los Angeles.

Advanced treatment eliminates many toxins, and traces of others remain
locked in the topsoil, thanks to "the incredible binding capacity of
biosolids," Rubin said.

Other scientists are more skeptical. Ellen Z. Harrison, director of
Cornell University's Waste Management Institute, believes the EPA's
safety standards are far too lenient when it comes to sludge.

Health effects haven't been definitively shown, she acknowledged, but
few scientists have seriously examined reports of sludge-related
illnesses. "The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence," she
said, citing a scientific maxim.

In Kern County and elsewhere, critics contend that the industrial
chemicals and medical wastes in sludge may combine over time to create
contaminants undreamed of by the EPA. With Green Acres situated over
part of the Kern County Water Bank, a massive underground water-storage
project, some residents contend that no matter what sludge does for
alfalfa, it carries an unacceptable risk for humans.

Larry Pearson, a councilman from Wasco, about 20 miles north of Green
Acres, likens a stretch of Interstate 5 to "driving through a toilet
bowl."

"I raised the sludge issue at a meeting of the California League of
Cities, and I was about run out of the room," he said. "They kept
telling me this stuff is so wonderful, it's really good for you. I told
them that if it's that good, to put it on their own farms and
flowerbeds."

Los Angeles officials say that test wells around the property are
rigorously monitored by four independent agencies. Sludge won't seep
into the groundwater, they say, because layers of impermeable hardpan
lie beneath the topsoil.

"There's no problem with the groundwater," said the sanitation bureau's
Gilbert, adding that Los Angeles itself owns much of the reserve in the
Kern County Water Bank.

Los Angeles officials contend that the anti-sludge campaign has been
whipped up by state Sen. Dean Florez (D-Shafter), an outspoken Harvard
MBA and former investment banker who grew up in the fields of the San
Joaquin Valley. Florez scoffs at the criticism. "A lot of us may have
been born at night but we weren't born last night," he said.

Florez, who futilely tried to get a sludge ban through the Legislature,
led the initiative drive. "We've become, in essence, the dump capital,"
he said. "It's hard to clean yourself up, if trucks keep dumping someone
else's problem in your yard."

Gilbert bristles at such analogies, pointing out that Kern County dumps
thousands of tons of toxic waste at facilities in Los Angeles County.
Besides, she said, huge tracts of farmland in Los Angeles County simply
aren't affordable.

Still, winning the hearts and minds of Kern County will be difficult.
The petition that put the sludge ban on the ballot drew 10,000
signatures more than needed.

RBM, the company that runs Green Acres, may place a few newspaper ads -
if not to win, then to "educate people that this hocus-pocus political
program is out of touch with reality," company President Jon Coffin
said.

The initiative's website features a two-story outhouse labeled "L.A.
County" on top and "Kern County" on the bottom.

That idea resonated with half a dozen pals lingering over doughnuts at a
bakery in Shafter, 25 miles north of Green Acres.

"Maybe I'm just suspicious by nature," said retired accountant Rex
Tudor, "but when they want to give me something like sewage sludge, I
can't believe it'll be good for me."