Alliance Opposes Reopening Troubled Florin-Perkins Landfill; Not What it Says it is
The Power Inn Alliance announced its opposition to reopening the Florin-Perkins Landfill which has been closed since 2005 due to illegal dumping and running afoul of environmental regulators.
The Alliance, a coalition of over 600 business and property owners throughout the Power Inn corridor, took this action following findings by the County Department of Environmental Review and Assessment (DERA) that no significant environmental changes have occurred since 1990 when the landfill permit was issued.
In response to the county, The Alliance noted 28 serious flaws in the document itself and questioned why a new out-of-town operator was being grandfathered in under old permit conditions, while current operators have had to meet severe restrictions imposed in recent years. “We have set a high bar for all the operators here,” said Jerry Vorpahl, executive director of The Alliance, “but one is being allowed to walk under it.” (The Power Inn area contains almost all landfill and solid waste operations in the county).
“They aren’t even being asked to process waste in an enclosed facility like all the other companies must do,” said Vorpahl. “It will all be done outside, under the hot Sacramento sun and you can imagine the stench that will emit.”
In addition to noxious odor, other problems include increased traffic along Florin-Perkins Road, impacts on water quality (“That stuff sitting out in the open gets rained on and then where do you think the contaminated water goes?” said Vorpahl), and incompatibility with the County General Plan which proposes urban centers along Jackson Rd. adjacent to the property.
Of major concern to The Alliance, as well as the 4,500 residents of the College Glen Neighborhood Association, which also opposes the project, is that the permit application was for a Materials Recovery and Transfer Station (where recyclables are sorted and then moved out) and not a traditional landfill (where refuse gets buried and covered up with dirt). However, the intended operator placed a quarter-page ad in the new AT&T Yellow Pages identifying itself specifically as a “Public Landfill.”
“Exactly what they contend they aren’t,” said Vorpahl. “We’d been given every assurance by both the county and the operator that this was not and would never be a landfill, when all along that’s exactly what they planned.”
Burnie Lenau, chairman of the Alliance Planning and Zoning Advisory Committee (PZAC), said of the county's environmental report, "That a landfill disguised as a "Materials Recovery/Large Volume Transfer Station," and accepting 500 tons of assorted waste per day, will have no impact on traffic, air quality, water quality, noise, odor or carbon emissions strikes me as more than an imcomplete report."
In response to the county’s assertion that the proposed landfill would have no negative impact, The Alliance noted, “Although the current Project proponent is new and cannot be held to account for past violations, the site’s history of mismanagement and the years of regulatory headaches it caused serve as a reminder of the need for the lead agency (DERA) to undertake the permitting process carefully and deliberately.”
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