A Utah lawmaker believes he has found a way to boost oversight at the state’s landfills, while cutting taxes for the waste-storage industry at the same time.
One catch: it will require an element of trust.
Rep. Lee Perry, R-Perry, is proposing a system of self-inspections at the state’s 168 landfills, an idea that drew a positive reception Thursday before the House Public Utilities, Energy and Technology Committee. Members voted unanimously to send the measure, HB373, to the full House for further debate.
Environmental advocates are not keen on the idea.
“The concept of a regulated entity doing ‘self inspection’ is a conflict-of-interest,” Scott Williams, executive director of HEAL Utah, an environmental group, said in an email. “And it makes a mockery of the need for industries that present risk to the public’s health to be held accountable by an independent inspector.”
Under current state law, solid waste facilities are supposed to be inspected by the Utah Division of Waste Management and Radiation Control, to ensure that landfills abide by the terms of their permits, operate safely, and don’t accept types of waste they aren’t equipped to handle.
But after spending a year going through into that state agency’s records, Perry said he found these inspections don’t always take place in a timely manner.
“We found we had waste facilities that weren’t inspected — some hadn’t been inspected for six years,” Perry said. In the same time period, he said, another landfill had been inspected 28 times.
Most of these waste-storage facilities, Perry said, were not “rogue landfills.” Rather, he said, many had complained to him about the lack of inspections.
“They’re saying, ‘We’re not being inspected, but we’re paying fees for it,’ ” he said.
Originally, Perry said, Utah planned to fund state inspectors through fees charged to landfills and other waste facilities. Somewhere along the way, Perry said, legislators instead diverted cash raised through some of these fees — roughly $400,000 a year — to the state general fund.
That, said Perry, left regulators underfunded — and unable to afford new technologies to make their operations more efficient.
“We haven’t funded [state] waste management sufficient to…for lack of a better, word, move them into the 21st Century,” Perry said.
Perry’s HB373 proposes to return half of the $400,000 to the Division of Waste Management. That money, he said, would be used to create an electronic inspections system that either the division, or the landfills themselves, could use to verify compliance.
Companies that choose to self-inspect would still be subject to state inspections every five years. Landfills not participating in the new program would be inspected every 3-5 years.
Landfills caught falsifying their self-inspection forms would have to pay larger penalties for their violations than landfills not participating in the program, Perry said. The lawmaker said he was also amenable to barring violators from self-inspection in future.
HB373 would dedicate another $200,000 to a special state fund to pay to clean up sites contaminated by hazardous waste. That fund is currently short $1.2 million, Perry said. Once that funding gap is closed, he said, his hope was to reduce fees on waste facilities.
Though he did not take a position on HB373, Scott Baird, a deputy director at Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), said he welcomed more funding for its Division of Waste Management. He said he also favored any plan that would boost efficiency in his department to reduce costs to industry.
But Baird disputed that claim that the Division of Waste Management has allowed landfills to go years without inspections. Some facilities are inspected more frequently than others, he said, based on the relative public risk they pose in case of a permit violation.
“Some that bring in one ton of waste per year, are probably not as much of a risk as those bringing in 500 tons of waste, so we allocate resources to balance out our inspections.” he said. “We can inspect, right now, as often as we want, and I don’t think this bill changes that.”
But Lindsay Beebe, with the environmental group Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, was not convinced that HB373 looked out for the public interest.
“Letting owners of solid waste landfills conduct their own inspections is like letting the fox look over the chicken coop,” Beebe said in a statement. “This begs the question of who are our decisions makers trying to protect? The community or private companies?”
HEAL Utah’s Williams called HB373 an affront to the state’s regulators, pointing to a provision that requires employees of self-inspecting landfills to attend special training programs — but limited to five hours in length.
“Five hours of training for those who self-inspect is an insult to the public employees who currently do this inspections, who are required to have extensive knowledge and skills,” he said.
