It looks to me as if this is a simple case of municipal body which owns and runs this landfill is both gamekeeper and poacher has got into trouble, and the citizens would do best to change that situation first, rather than spend on a legal case arguing about it. Here is a quotation from the article:
The Citizens for Clean Water board of directors plans to discuss funding for a lawsuit to compel the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality to close the NABORS landfill in north Baxter County, according to CFCW president, Bob Cohee.
The CFCW board's next meeting is Feb. 7.
Cohee said Wednesday he will recommend the creation of a legal fund of at least $20,000 to move forward with the suit.
The suit, if filed, would mark the second time CFCW has called out the regulator in a court of law to enforce state regulations regarding the NABORS landfill. Cohee says the NABORS landfill has accumulated a long record of violations pertaining to overfilled areas within the landfill and a plume of pollutants seeping into sample waters taken from within and around one overfilled area.
The owner of the landfill? The Ozark Mountain Regional Solid Waste Management District ? has been trying to sell it for a year to North Arkansas Board of Regional Sanitation, an incorporation of Baxter and Marion counties and the city of Mountain Home. Investment bankers have declined to offer $17 million issue public revenue bonds to finance the transaction.
Ozark Mountain Regional Solid Waste Management District's board of directors voted Tuesday to set a March 13 deadline for the North Arkansas Board of Regional Sanitation proposal and to offer NABORS to other prospective buyers after that date.
"We are extremely opposed to privatizing," Cohee said. "The landfill is in bad enough shape as it is. Privatizing would be total havoc."
Citizens for Clean Water sued ADEQ in 1989 to compel the regulator to require former owners, RLH Inc., to stop leachate observed flowing from the side of a waste storage cell to an area of the landfill not served by a leachate retention pond. That outing resulted in a correction before the issue came to trial. CFCW's legal fee of $11,000, Cohee said.
RLH sold the landfill and a companion hauling service to Northwest Arkansas Regional Solid Waste Management District (now Ozark Mountain Regional Solid Waste Management District) for $12 million on Sept. 1, 2003, after two years of negotiations between RLH and ADEQ regarding ongoing regulatory violations.
On Sept. 23, 2005, the waste management district sought authorization to enlarge the storage area within the 700-acre tract situated 10 miles from Mountain Home's public water intake on Norfork Lake.
Several notices of violation from ADEQ between 2003-05 against RLH were settled early in 2005, with the district and RLH both signing a consent order in which RLH did not concede fault and ADEQ levied a $250,000 fine, then ADEQ's largest fine ever.
The agreement also included a corrective action plan regarding an overfilled area in the landfill which is now a five-year-old correction action plan and the subject of five failed attempts by four engineering firms to correct.
Inspectors in 2005 had found 101 inches of leachate on top of a geo-plastic liner permitted to hold only 12 inches, according to Bulletin archives.
ADEQ also has a $500,000 letter of credit from a bank guaranteeing funds to properly close the offending portion of the landfill should RLH shirk its responsibilities.
NABORS had consumed all of a $1 million line of credit from Arvest Bank when Ozark Mountain Regional Solid Waste Management District took control of the landfill in February 2009 from the Northwest Arkansas Regional Economic Development District.
NABORS finished 2008 with a deficit of $830,000 and lost another $945,000 in 2009.
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