Sludge Watch ==> Sorting Through the Muck - Sludge in Kern County

[maureen.reilly at sympatico.ca]

http://www.bakersfield.com/102/story/52638.html

Sludge: Sorting through the muck
BY SARAH RUBY, Californian staff writer
e-mail: sruby at bakersfield.com | Saturday, May 20 2006 8:01 PM
Last Updated: Saturday, May 20 2006 10:10 PM

Staff writer Gretchen Wenner contributed to this report.

Photos:
Photo by Roger Hornback
Biosolids are run through a dewatering process at the Orange County 
Sanitation District plant in Fountain Valley, Calif.

Photo by Gretchen Wenner
Ron Hurlbert, who runs cattle and hunts ducks near Honey Bucket Farms, is 
opposed to sludge operations in Kern County.
Video:
>From L.A. to Kern: Follow that sludge (4:30)
THE ISSUE:

Kern’s issues with sewage sludge are economic, environmental and emotional. 
Locals are tired of taking crap — literally and figuratively — from the rest 
of Southern California.

And whatever virtues sludge can claim as a fertilizer, local leaders don’t 
want to risk it fouling water supplies or Kern’s $3.5 billion agricultural 
economy.

Just the notion sludge is tainting local produce worries many in the county.

In June, voters will decide if sewage sludge should be banned from cropland 
in unincorporated Kern. The ballot measure, known as Measure E, would shut 
down two imported sludge farms and force the city of Los Angeles, Los 
Angeles County, Orange County and others to find a new home for their 
treated sewage.

As Election Day draws closer, here’s how those closest to the issue see it.

WHAT IS SLUDGE?

Sewage sludge, a condensed cake or Jell-O-like mixture, is the solid 
byproduct of treatment plants that purify sewer water and make it safe to 
pour into the ocean.

Fresh sludge curls with steam when it’s piled into trucks, hot from two to 
three weeks in pathogen-killing tanks.

A third of the state’s sewage sludge is hauled to Kern; half of that is used 
to fertilize animal feed crops; the other half is composted and spread on 
land in Kings County and beyond.

Sludge, sauvignon an unpalatable mix

There’s a place in Kern where sewage sludge blows in occasional gusts, 
dusting rows of cabernet sauvignon across a two-lane country road. Table 
grapes are a half-mile away, flanked by fields of pistachios and almonds.

The sludge comes from Orange County. The crops are shipped around the world. 
Their intersection worries an agriculture industry worth $3.5 billion.

“I think perception is a big issue,” said Jeff Fabbri, who grows almonds and 
tomatoes about a mile downwind of a sludge field on Garces Highway.

“(Consumers) make the ultimate decision about where they buy what they eat. 
Right now they’re choosing to buy from our location, and we want to make 
sure they continue to do that.”

Notions of sludge-crusted orchard fruit or infiltrated wine barrels could 
drive away customers, farmers say.

Northwest Kern is “a pretty dusty place,” Fabbri said. “Can (sludge dust) 
move from one ranch to the other? Sure. Is it significant? I’m certainly not 
the expert to tell you.”

On a rural lot near the Garces Highway sludge field, grape farmer Don Ludy 
shares this concern. It’s a risky business to spread sewage sludge — which 
includes household and industrial chemicals sent down Southern California 
drains — over multibillion dollar water supplies, he said. He wonders what 
kinds of bacteria and viruses survive in treated sewage, and nothing he’s 
seen convinces him sludge is safe in the long term.

“We have good science available that could answer these questions,” he said. 
“I don’t know why they don’t answer them.”

There’s no single test that will prove sludge’s safety, said Alan Rubin, a 
former U.S. EPA official who now does consulting work for sludge companies. 
To local farmers, the absence of proof is alarming. In Rubin’s view, sludge 
is like the proverbial husband trying to prove he never beat his wife.

“It’s a conundrum, you can’t do it,” he said. “All you can do is rely on 
close to 50 years of research (that shows) there’s absolutely no impact to 
groundwater and the environment.”

Industry’s worst ends up in sludge

Flush by flush, Southern Californians relieve themselves of antidepressants, 
cholesterol medication, birth control and other drugs. Along with soaps and 
detergents, fetuses wash down the drain “all the time” in the city of Los 
Angeles, said Joe Mundine, assistant director of the Los Angeles Bureau of 
Sanitation. The sewer flows with other novelties — bicycles, motorcycles, 
parachutes and, about three years ago, a female murder victim.

Companies also contribute. In Los Angeles and surrounding cities, more than 
6,000 businesses send industrial waste down the drain. These dischargers, 
which include electroplating and metal finishing outfits, pharmaceutical 
companies, oil refineries and the Los Angeles Zoo, rinsed more than 1,000 
pounds of lead, chromium, copper and other heavy metals into the sewer each 
day in 2004. That’s down 78 percent since 1980.

Bulky or gritty solids are filtered and sent to the landfill, but 
researchers have found more than 500 unregulated pesticides, pharmaceuticals 
and other organic chemicals in sludge samples, said Ellen Harrison, director 
of the department of crop and soil sciences at Cornell University. There’s 
danger of toxins accumulating in plants, she said, and some turn up in 
sludge at greater concentrations than the U.S. EPA would allow in soil.

“Basically, industry goes down the drain,” Harrison said. “It’s going to end 
up somewhere, and many of the worst things end up in sludge.”

Despite a lot of scientific unknowns, one known fact is that sludge dumping 
wasn’t good for the Pacific Ocean.

By the time ocean dumping ended in 1987, the city of Los Angeles had created 
an underwater desert seven miles from shore, according to Mundine.

To Harrison, the unknowns are a case for caution. But others believe the 
dangers, if they existed, of dumping Southern California’s sludge on several 
thousand acres of farmland would have shown themselves already. Sludge has 
been in wide use for decades, and “if this stuff was as bad as they’re 
claiming it is, you would really have a significant number of observations 
and complaints going on,” said Alan

Rubin, a former U.S. EPA official who consults for Responsible Biosolids 
Management, a local sludge farm operator.

In 22 years of studying sludge, “I’ve had yet to find a crop contamination 
situation,” he said.

Sludge might be a good source of nitrogen, but its other ingredients could 
build to unhealthy levels, said Blake Sanden, a soil and water adviser with 
the University of California Cooperative Extension in Bakersfield. Adding a 
little sludge to your fertilizer recipe every three or four years would 
provide usable nutrients without much of an environmental risk, he said, but 
Kern has confined its sludge applications to heavily fertilized ghettos.

“Agronomically, it’s a load of crap what’s going on,” Sanden said. “Those 
acreages in general, they’ve just had too much stuff applied on them for too 
long.”

In 2004, Sanden and a group of U.C. Davis professors published a four-year 
study of sludge use in Kern. They tested some of the same fields at the 
center of today’s controversy, and found treated sewage leaves behind more 
salts and metals than standard fertilizer. Sludge “may have already had a 
hand in some crop failures seen in Kern County,” the report says.

Meanwhile, Kern has banned all but the most highly treated sludge from its 
fields. Ultra-processed sludge has fewer pathogens, but it also has less 
nitrogen. That forces sludge farmers to use more of it to grow a good crop, 
further aggravating concerns over salts and metals, Sanden said.

Sludge could be a useful product if used sparingly — an unlikely possibility 
given the “current climate of fear” described in the 2004 report. The 
opportunity for moderation was lost by “the early use of slipshod 
contractors, arrogant attitudes and a focus on saving a thin dime at the 
expense of quality farming,” the report says.

‘No industry without risks,’ farmer says

Farmers fighting sludge are “throwing rocks into glass houses, said Shaen 
Magan, who runs Honey Bucket Farms, a 4,200-acre sludge operation on 
Corcoran Road and Garces Highway. Synthetic fertilizers and antibiotic-laden 
manures are more dangerous and less regulated than relatively small amounts 
of sewage sludge, he said. Not to mention the 24 million pounds of 
pesticides dropped in Kern’s fields each year.

“You don’t think dairies are using pharmaceuticals? You should see the 
veterinarian bills,” he said.

Sludge farms fill fewer than 10,000 acres, a fraction of the 873,000 acres 
of harvested farmland in Kern. Magan charges a fee to haul sludge, and uses 
it to grow sudan grass, wheat, barley, hay and other crops consumed by 
livestock in Kern and as far away as Japan.

No farming operation is without its environmental risks, Magan said. As he 
puts it, “every family has plenty of dirty laundry,” whether it be workers 
poisoned with pesticides, fouled water or polluted air. It’s hypocritical to 
single out sludge farms, he said.

Farmers should be more concerned about manure fertilizer, which is “much 
worse” than sludge, said Alan Rubin, a former U.S. EPA official who now 
works as a consultant for the company that runs the city of Los Angeles’ 
sludge farm. Unlike sludge, animal manure isn’t regulated or treated for 
pathogens, he said. Dairy cow manure helped ruin water supplies in Chino, 
where taxpayers are spending $80 million to build two desalinization plants. 
And yet manure has a much lower profile.

That’s because the sludge debate isn’t about science, Rubin said. It’s about 
Kern’s desire for “equity” with Los Angeles.

“(It’s) the resentment some people are feeling about Los Angeles bringing 
material into Kern County and not managing it (themselves),” he said.

Honey Bucket Farms stirs controversy

Honey Bucket Farms sits on Corcoran Road and Garces Highway at the Kings 
County line. Its nearest neighbors are food crops, duck clubs and the Kern 
National Wildlife Refuge, and each year it absorbs a little more than a 
third of Orange County’s treated sewage.

>From a distance, Honey Bucket looks like any other truck yard. Incoming 
haulers put their load on a conveyor belt, where it’s mixed with 
pathogen-killing powders and dropped into truck beds headed for the fields. 
Spreaders fling the mixture high into the air and let it settle on the 
ground.

A typical day at Honey Bucket smells faintly of the animal farm, but on bad 
days, the odor can take your breath away, said Ron Hurlbert, who runs cattle 
and hunts ducks next to the sludge fields. The whir of sludge trucks is 
constant, he said, and in dry weather, sludge spreaders stir up columns of 
powdery soil that sail southward.

Yet Orange County officials “make it sound like you could use (sludge) as a 
mud bath at a health spa,” he said.

Hurlbert would love to see Honey Bucket gone. He’s fighting with its owner, 
Shaen Magan, over access to his property. Magan’s fields are sometimes 
sprinkled with plastic tampon applicators and other scraps, Hurlbert said. 
On a bad day, the flies are “like a plague.” His girlfriend refuses to 
visit.

“This is a joke,” he said. “It’s a hazardous waste dump in the middle of the 
valley.”

Not everyone in the neighborhood wants to see Kern’s sludge trade disappear.

Sheep herder Javier Onaindia grazes his animals on Magan’s land after the 
forage crops have been harvested.

“I never had a problem,” he said. “The sheep are really happy and (Magan) is 
a good neighbor.”

Sludge aesthetics are an issue for employees at the Kern National Wildlife 
Refuge.

Orange County and Magan have tried to mitigate their impact on the refuge, 
but they also deny they’re the source of flies and smells that “can make you 
lose your appetite,” said David Hardt, who manages the preserve. Visitors 
are “disgusted” when they find out they’re bird-watching next to a sludge 
farm, he said.

Hardt has managed the refuge for the past eight years, but he also worked 
there about 25 years ago. “We never had problems like that until the sludge 
operation showed up,” he said.

It’s distressing for Hardt, who is trying to raise the 11,000-acre 
preserve’s profile as some of the last wetland habitat in the region. Some 
600,000 surface acres of marshland once blanketed the valley from Fresno to 
Kern, he said.

Hardt has no quarrel with Magan, but he wonders why Orange County is 
exporting its waste problem to Kern.

“If there’s nothing to be concerned about, then take care of it at home,” he 
said.

Kern sludge ban could mean lawsuit

The city of Los Angeles’ sewage treatment plant is a wonder of civil 
engineering.

With towering egglike sludge tanks and slithering tubes, the Hyperion 
Treatment Plant sits on 144 waterfront acres near Manhattan Beach. Each day 
the plant, a piece of infrastructure so precious it’s seventh on the FBI’s 
list of possible terrorist targets in Los Angeles, sends 650 tons of sludge 
to a farm in Kern.

The city of Los Angeles has made sure its sewage sludge is among the most 
highly treated in the country. Unlike other jurisdictions, which blend 
sludge with pathogen-killing powders to meet Kern’s demand for “exceptional 
quality,” Los Angeles spent $40 million on a high-tech solution in 2002.

City officials understand that sewage sludge is unpopular in Kern, said Joe 
Mundine, an assistant director of the Los Angeles Bureau of Sanitation. The 
city is resigned to a ban in Kern, but “we want to recover our investment,” 
he said. That could mean a lawsuit.

The future of sewage sludge is as an energy source, Mundine said. Until 
then, the city might have to haul its waste to Arizona for use on crops, or 
send it to the landfill. This year, the city will pay its sludge contractor 
$7.3 million to haul and spread sludge in Kern; the Arizona option would 
cost twice as much, and the landfill more than triple.

Until 1987, Los Angeles and other jurisdictions dumped sewage in the ocean. 
The city’s dump spot “turned into a desert” seven miles from shore, Mundine 
said.

When state law ended ocean dumping, the city dabbled in energy production 
from sewage sludge. At the time the costs were prohibitive, but “technology 
is advancing by leaps and bounds today,” he said. If he had his choice, 
Mundine would build a power plant in Los Angeles to take care of the city’s 
sewage.

“I would like to manage our waste here, I think everybody in Los Angeles 
would,” he said.

But no one wants to live next door to a sludge-burning power plant, he said. 
Not in Bakersfield, not in Los Angeles.

“It’s a question of where and how,” he said. “Urbanized areas don’t want 
(them). Where do you site facilities to do this kind of activity?”

Water concerns reopened debate

When it comes to water, Kern’s geography is its blessing and its curse. We 
live in a closed basin, which keeps vast underground water supplies from 
draining to the ocean. The same goes for contaminants, which won’t wash away 
either.

Water concerns reopened a sludge debate that had died down after Kern banned 
all but the most highly treated sludge. In 2004, Kern County Water Agency 
officials suggested moving sludge farms and dairies away from underground 
reservoirs that would cost $13 billion to replace.

The agency found Southern California sanitation districts “unresponsive” to 
its concerns, said Lloyd Fryer, principal water resources planner for the 
Kern County Water Agency.

Los Angeles’ sludge farm, Green Acres, sits just south of the Kern Water 
Bank and west of a storage project being developed by Kern Delta Water 
District. Honey Bucket Farms, whose biggest clients are sewage districts in 
Orange County and Los Angeles County, operates near the stores of Semitropic 
Water Storage District.

A big customer of local water banks is Metropolitan Water District, which 
serves some of the same Southern California households producing sludge 
hauled to Kern. Metropolitan has rights to 350,000 acre-feet of Semitropic’s 
water, and a $30 million stake in Kern Delta’s new storage project. All told 
that’s enough water to feed 1.2 million homes for one year.

The water is a backup supply, meant to see Southern California through the 
dry years. If the banks were tainted and Metropolitan had to buy that water 
elsewhere, it could pay as much as $240 million based on a rate of $400 per 
acre-foot, Fryer said.

“We’re having a hard time understanding why (the sanitation districts) think 
it’s okay to be crapping in your own water supply,” Fryer said.

The agency doesn’t know if sludge farms are leaking contaminants, and it 
would cost a small fortune in monitoring wells to find out. But “if there’s 
a risk to be taken, Kern County’s groundwater basin should not be asked to 
take (it),” he said.

Not all water officials are concerned about sludge. There are “no big alarm 
bells in the water community that this is a real and present danger,” said 
Ronald Gastelum, who retired as chief executive officer of Metropolitan 
Water District in 2004.

He no longer speaks on behalf of Metropolitan, but “my sense is (the sludge 
controversy is) more of a question of people’s sensibilities and politics, 
frankly,” he said.

Kern has two destinations for waste

San Bernadino-based U.S.A. Transport Inc. ran Kern’s smallest sludge 
importing operation until February, when state toxics officials reclassified 
its stockpile of pathogen-killing powder as hazardous waste. Now the county 
has two destinations for imported sludge:

Green Acres

Acres: 4,688

Owner: city of Los Angeles

Operator: Responsible Biosolids Management, a Santa Barbara company

Williamson Act*: no

Wet tons of sludge hauled and spread in 2005: 253,986.4

Cities the sludge came from: Los Angeles, Burbank, Glendale, Santa Monica, 
El Segundo, Beverly Hills, Culver City, San Fernando, West Hollywood

What it costs Los Angeles to have each ton hauled and spread: $27.28

Crops grown: wheat, milo, sudan grass, alfalfa, corn

Anticipated total hauling and spreading costs this fiscal year: $7.3 million

What it would cost each year to send the farm’s sludge to Arizona: $14.6 
million

What it would cost each year to send the farm’s sludge to a landfill: $26.5 
million

Honey Bucket Farms

Acres: roughly 4,200

Owner: A. H. Martin Inc.

Operator: Shaen Magan

Williamson Act*: yes

Federal farm subsidies, 1995 to 2004**: $2 million to Magan and his partners

Outstanding IRS tax liens: $787,484, which Magan disputes

Wet tons of sludge hauled and spread in 2005: 167,752.9

Where it came from: Orange County, Los Angeles County, Valencia, Goleta, 
Ventura County

What it costs to have each ton hauled and spread: about $40

Crops grown: hay, sudan grass, cotton, wheat, corn, sorghum, barley, oats

* A program that gives property tax breaks to farmers who agree not to 
develop land for 10 years ** According to the Environmental Working Group’s 
Farm Subsidy Database, www.ewg.org

City can keep plowing

County officials will have to find another place for Kern’s municipal sludge 
if Measure E passes, but the city of Bakersfield can keep on plowing. The 
initiative restricts sludge on unincorporated county land, leaving intact 
Bakersfield’s 5,000-acre sludge farm in the southeast.

Sludge farmers outside the city see this as hypocritical, both because it 
protects sludge spreading within city limits and because the county will 
likely have to compost its waste and export it northward.

But Kern residents produce a small fraction of what’s coming in from 
Southern California, said Raul Rojas, the city’s public works director. A 
year’s supply of Bakersfield sludge — between 4,000 and 5,000 wet tons — is 
probably about five days worth to the city of Los Angeles, he said.

Even with explosive growth, local waste volumes won’t begin to approach Los 
Angeles levels anytime soon, Rojas said. In 100 years the city’s waste 
treatment plants will likely handle 130 million gallons of sewage daily. Los 
Angeles already processes more than four times that amount, he said.

“Our grandchildren will probably be in their grave” by the time sludge 
becomes a problem for the city, Rojas said.

Florez leads campaign

Keep Kern Clean is a high-concept campaign. Its goal? To send sludge 
packing. Its tools? Innumerable news conferences and an animated turd 
lugging a suitcase.

The campaign reflects the humor and indignation of state Sen. Dean Florez, 
the Democrat from Shafter who entered the sludge debate with a vigor 
typically reserved for candidates’ own campaigns. He worked tables at the 
county fair and coordinated a petition drive, helping turn concerns about 
water quality, health and Kern’s reputation as a food producer into a 
countywide battle against the big bad neighbor next door.

“A lot of voters are just kind of tired of being the dumping ground for 
everyone else in the state,” Florez said. “Enough sludge, enough sexual 
predators, enough prisons, enough dairies. When does the county stand up for 
itself?”

Sludge industry leaders dismiss Florez as a showman who’s found the perfect 
political issue.

“It’s really sad to see the lambs led to slaughter by politicians,” said 
Shaen Magan, who runs Honey Bucket Farms, a sludge farm on Corcoran Road and 
Garces Highway.

Florez is unapologetic about a campaign that’s united housewives, farmers, 
water officials and politicians of all stripes. When asked about his 
motives, he returns to a question of his own: “If (sludge is) so valuable, 
why don’t they apply it on their own land?”

Timeline

1987 Ocean dumping of sewage is outlawed

1993 The U.S. EPA publishes sludge disposal standards for cropland

1994 Locals start to complain as contractors and growers begin spreading 
sludge on roughly 24,000 acres across Kern

1996 Kern officials begin writing their own law governing sludge spreading

1996-97 More than 1 million wet tons of sludge come to Kern annually; city 
of Oxnard buys a sludge farm outside Wasco

1998 A farming coalition, Kern Food Growers Against Sewage Sludge, opposes 
sludge use

1998 Kern’s Board of Supervisors passes a temporary sludge ordinance l 
Tulare and Stanislaus counties ban all but the most highly treated sludge

1999 Kern passes a ban on all but the most highly treated sludge starting in 
January 2003; Southern California sewage districts sue and the litigation is 
ongoing. Kern is down to five sludge farms spreading less than 300,000 wet 
tons of sludge annually

2000 Los Angeles buys Green Acres, a 4,688-acre sludge farm

2001 Kings County bans all but the most highly treated sludge. Local field 
studies show sewage sludge boosts wheat crops and increases protein content 
when managed properly

2002 Sludge generators and handlers file several new suits against Kern, 
claiming its ordinance is discriminatory, causes economic hardship, etc.; 
the cases were thrown out or decided in favor of the county. Three sludge 
spreaders are left in Kern, handling some 300,000 wet tons per year on 7,000 
acres. The city of Los Angeles spends $40 million to produce “exceptional 
quality” sludge that will meet Kern’s standards.

2004 Kern County Water Agency suggests moving all sludge farms and dairies 
to lands in western Kern out of the way of water resources

2005 State Sen. Dean Florez, D-Shafter and other leaders launch a campaign 
to ban sludge by referendum

2006 City of Oxnard sludge farm loses permit for stockpiling vast piles of 
hazardous waste. Election on June 6 when Kern residents will vote on whether 
to ban sludge

Source: Biosolids Land Application Trials in Kern County: 1998-2002 (UC 
Davis study), Kern County Resource Management Agency, Californian archives