Landfill to Star on Small Screen?

With its future shrouded in uncertainty as a result of the recent Oregon Supreme Court decision calling the dump's expansion into doubt, is Riverbend Landfill looking to the Small Screen to keep its coffers full?

Little birds (mainly seagulls and falcons) have dropped serious hints lately that our lowly mountain of a dump may soon be streaming on a screen near you!

Imagine twenty hardy women and men, provisioned with nothing more than machetes, canteens, hefty bags of rice, nose plugs, and the clothes on their backs, living off the land for six weeks.  You've guessed it!  Survivor: Landfill is expected to begin filming at the dump in November.

Sources tell us that CBS Television decided to go with a winter format to maximize contestants' misery, a hallmark of the show.  Contestants can expect floods, snow, hordes of seagulls and vermin, falcon attacks, miasmic odors, and thousands of tons of garbage.  They will have to dodge coyotes and well-drilling rigs and watch for toxic leachate leaks.

  

While participants will be forced to flee from the waste while it's being dumped, they will also be competing with mighty bulldozers, tractors, excavators, compactors, grapples, and loaders for the precious foodstuffs and textiles buried in the dumped trash.  From the looks of things, they won't want for comfy furniture, protection from the elements, soft beds, or even personal waste disposal!

Photo of dump in snow by Delahanty; bottom, dump runoff enters McPhillips Creek

Contestants will be able to augment their food supplies with fish, including delicacies such as six-legged frogs, they catch themselves in the South Yamhill River across from the old leaking Whiteson dump.  They can also snare the critters that frequent the landfill, including the aforementioned birds and vermin.

Participants should not lack for shelter, however, as the dump is covered with tarps they can use for tent material.  And numerous methane leaks will provide a ready fuel for fire.

We're told that the winner -- the Sole Survivor -- will be honored with a special reward for surviving this ordeal:  a year's free waste disposal!  Of course, he or she will have to bring the garbage to the landfill themselves.

We look forward to this amazing show -- or would, if Survivor: Landfill weren't an April Fool!

DEQ Not Doing Its Job -- Surprise, Surprise

According to in-depth reporting in the Oregonian newspaper, DEQ, the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, is not the heroic protector of Oregon's ecosystems that it makes itself out to be.

Neighbors of Riverbend Landfill, people who pass the landfill on the highway, and others who have been fighting Riverbend's expansion for years have long known what the Oregonian and the rest of the state are just waking up to:  DEQ's "clients" are the industries it monitors, not the people -- or the land, water, air, and wildlife -- of Oregon.

Oregonian reporter Rob Davis notes that "[f]or years, the agency’s No. 1 internal performance measure has been providing 'good' or 'excellent' customer service to the industries it regulates."

The Oregonian's reporting focuses on money in politics, emphasizing that industries and their lobbying associations easily influence decisions at the agency by funneling campaign contributions to key legislators.  These legislators in turn use DEQ's budget to keep the agency in line.  As a result, the paper reports, a "deep culture of deference" to regulated industries has developed at DEQ.

Yamhill County has felt the pressure corporate money can bring to bear.  Over the years, at least some pro-expansion Commissioners have accepted handsome contributions from Riverbend or its owner, Texas-based corporate giant Waste Management.  And the company offered grants of $15,000 each to cities in the County.  No strings attached, of course, but subsequently, only McMinnville, which rejected the grant, publicly opposed dump expansion.

Moreover, those who have long battled Riverbend and Waste Management know that campaign money is not the only fly in DEQ's ointment.  As DEQ operations are currently structured, regulated industries provide key monitoring data to DEQ.  And industry, not DEQ, chooses and hires the consultants DEQ relies on to ensure that regulations are followed.

The people and environment of Oregon would be better served if state policy required DEQ to pre-qualify and hire consultants.  Industry can continue to foot the bill, but the consultant's client would be the State, not industry.

To read all of the Oregonian and Rob Davis' fascinating reporting, click here.  You can select Parts One, Two, Three, or Four at the top of the web page.

Supreme Court Dumps Dump!

After more than 15 months of waiting, Yamhill County farmers, residents, and businesses finally got the message they'd been waiting for:  The Oregon Supreme Court declared last Thursday that the County had applied the wrong standard in approving Riverbend Landfill's expansion plans.  The decision now goes back to LUBA (the Land Use Board of Appeals) for further action.

If you have a long memory, you might recall that the County Board of Commissioners (BOC) voted in 2015 to approve a 29-acre landfill expansion that would bring garbage right up to Highway 18.  By law, the expansion could be approved only if the County found that expanding the dump would not impose "significant impacts" on surrounding farms.

The County found no "significant" impacts, but just in case, it added conditions of approval that required Riverbend to pay some farmers for the harm their farms incurred as a result of landfill activities.  LUBA upheld most of the County's decision, and landfill opponents appealed.

The Supreme Court ruled, first, that a "significant" impact is an impact that is greater than merely "measurable" but less than "major."  It is not at all clear that the County applied this standard.

Next the Court held that each "accepted farm practice" on each impacted farm must be analyzed separately.  Any one significant impact is sufficient to preclude approval.

Finally, the Court also held that a nonfarm use like the dump cannot get around the significant impact rule by compensating farmers for impacts or by paying them off ("pay to play").

The Supreme Court's rejection of "pay to play" is particularly important.  If the Court had ruled that a nonfarm use could buy its way onto farmland, farms throughout Oregon would have been in jeopardy.  There are 27 different nonfarm uses, from resorts to golf courses, that could have used this option to expand onto farmland.

What's next?  LUBA could re-analyze the County's 2015 factual findings itself, or it could send the entire case back to the BOC for a fresh look under the newly-defined rules.

Stay tuned!

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