City negotiating on dumping violation

City negotiating on dumping violation



PETER GUINTA
peter.guinta@staugustine.com
Publication Date: 10/23/07


A draft Department of Environmental Protection order would levy a $33,698 fine to the city of St. Augustine for moving dirt from an old Riberia Street landfill to a water-filled borrow pit off North Holmes Boulevard.

The draft order also would require the city to complete a series of corrective measures, with possible fines of $200 per day for some requirements not met and $1,000 per day for others.

City Manager Bill Harriss said Monday that the order is a draft that must be approved by the City Commission before any mitigation or cleanup begins.

"We're very close to finishing it," Harriss said. "We just wanted to know exactly what's going to happen."

The fine proposed now is lower than the $46,000 fine earlier proposed by the DEP.

St. Augustine resident Ed Slavin, who reported the dumping to the National Response Center in 2006, now calls the proposed response a "cover-up" because no one was criminally prosecuted.

"FDEP never interviewed our city manager, our mayor, vice mayor and commissioners," Slavin wrote in a letter to The Record. "Our city manager ordered and authorized the illegal dumping (and) refused to answer my questions about the illegal dumping."

Harris said he was interviewed by DEP and the agency found that the dumping was recommended by two city engineers who did not carefully read the law before making a recommendation. The engineers are no longer working for the city, Harriss said.

"There was incompetence, but not criminal intent," he said. "Professional engineers said we were allowed to do this. Slavin just wants to prosecute me personally."

Slavin believes the city ruled that he was no longer a resident so he wouldn't have legal standing to appeal any DEP order.

"(This order is) one that should make every land-raping, wetland-destroying carpet-bagging foreign investor jump for joy and uncork the champagne," Slavin said. "This is a dark day indeed for enforcement of Florida's environmental laws. Polluter-coddling FDEP has no sincere interest in encouraging citizens to report, detect, deter and punish illegal governmental environmental depredations."

He said the city polluted the water off Holmes Boulevard with "arsenic, sewage, bedsprings and other illegal dumping."

Other DEP-mandated corrective measures in the draft said the city must:


Immediately stop removal of dirt from the Riberia landfill.


Remove within 60 days the thousands of tons of lime sludge and street sweepings dumped into the North Holmes borrow pit.


Remove within 475 days all dirt taken from the Riberia site and return it there.


Cover the returned dirt with clean fill and vegetation within 60 days.


Turn over within 45 days all bills or manifests documenting the excavation and transportation of the fill to Riberia.


Within 90 days turn in a report that, among other things, requires analysis of the soil and surface water on Holmes Boulevard, plus the results from three monitoring wells.


Provide drinking water within seven days and a safe drinking water supply within 180 days for any potable water well contaminated by chemicals from the dumping.

Harriss said no work will begin until the agreement is signed with DEP.

"We're going to take the stuff and put it back," he said of the moved waste material. "Through incompetence, this turned out to be a bad thing. But Slavin's the only one not happy."


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