Illegal dump site could cost county millions to clean up

Published 12:47 pm Thursday, December 11, 2008

By Teresa Herriman

The Courier-Herald

As development continues to inch towards an illegal dump site at 22027 Connells Prairie Road E., neighbors are wondering when the mess will be cleaned up.

Steve Wamback, who heads the Pierce County Responds program as part of his duties as the county's solid waste administrator for Pierce County Public Works, said approximately $50,000 of work has been completed on the site. Wamback is overseeing the clean up of the property originally owned by Michael W. Bachmann.

So far, the county has conducted an environmental assessment and determined the illegal dump does not pose a hazard to the ground water. They have also cleared containers, demolished out buildings and removed thousands of gallons of chemicals and hazardous waste.

Presently, however, his group has hit an impasse. Until the actual owner of all of the items on the property has been determined, clean up has been put on hold. The county is leery of proceeding without clear direction, Wamback said. The county was sued in another case where the property owner accused the county of improperly removing items from a clean-up site.

Regardless of the delay, Wamback said he is optimistic his crews will be back soon.

"We're getting pretty close to a resolution," he said.

The county estimates it will cost approximately $6 million to clean up the 155,000 tons of garbage that covers nearly nine acres of the 50-acre site. Piles of wood and other construction waste - household garbage and acres of crushed glass - abuts the up-scale White River Estate housing development under construction between Bonney Lake and Buckley.

The sheer quantity of material is hard to fathom. According to Pierce County officials, it equals the amount of garbage the entire country produces during a six-month period.

"Any time you have that much garbage contained on a property, you have an environmental impact," Wamback said.

In September of last year, Bachmann pled guilty to two gross misdemeanor charges for illegal dumping and two misdemeanors for zoning violations and maintaining a public nuisance. He was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison and fined $5,000 on each gross misdemeanor and $1,000 on each simple misdemeanor.

The county foreclosed on the property when Bachmann failed to pay his taxes. A bank in Enumclaw owns the house, located on a separate parcel. A tenant lives in the house.

According to court documents, Bachmann was conducting an illegal landfill. He had installed a scale and was charging neighbors to dump their household garbage on his property. The county shut down his operation once, Wamback said.

"His entire operation was illegal," he said. "He had no permits."

But Bachmann constructed a new road and continued taking garbage.

"He defied each of those orders. It wasn't until he was actually incarcerated that he stopped working," Wamback explained.

By far the largest single commodity on the property is glass.

"Apparently he (Bachmann) had been engaged in the business of recycling glass from various construction sites."

"It doesn't appear the economics of his plan worked out," Wamback said.

He was able to collect the glass, but not get rid of it.

The vast mounds of blue-green glass can be seen from the nearby roadway.

The county recently discovered what Bachmann had already learned. Due to the low quality of the glass, getting it properly prepped to be acceptable to a recycler is not cost efficient.

The county is looking at other options. Officials would like to avoid disposing of it in a landfill, Wamback said.

The original cost estimate to clean up the site was $14 million. Typically, the property owner is responsible for paying for the clean up; however, since the county foreclosed on the property, they also inherited the clean up cost.

"We're trying to get the clean up cost down to $6 million," Wamback said. "It's still a lot of money for the county to expend, but it needs to be cleaned up."

The county could recoup some of the clean up costs when it sells the property. However, given the zoning and wetland issues, it is highly unlikely the county will recover the entire cost of the clean up, he added.

"That land doesn't appear to be worth $6 million," he said.

The Bachmann property was one of the original "Dirty Dozen" sites targeted by the Pierce County Responds program, a group of several agencies that includes the Pierce County Prosecutor's Office, Planning and Land Services, Public Works, the health department, the Sheriff's Department, the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency and the Washington State Patrol. The multi-agency program, founded in 2002, was designed as a comprehensive approach to the problem of illegal dumping of waste and nuisance vehicles.

According to Wamback, all of the original sites have been cleaned and the cases closed. The Bachmann property and the Shear Transport site, located just west of Buckley, at 26719 SR 410 E., are the only remaining clean-up sites identified as members of the "Dirty Dozen" that have not yet been completed.

While clean up is slowly progressing on the eastern portion of the Shear site, owners of the western portion are not cooperating with authorities, Wamback said.

"We are still actively pursing litigation," he said.

Teresa Herriman can be reached at therriman@cmg-northwest2.go-vip.net/courierherald.