Amador County supervisors are faced with the high cost of making the county landfill comply with state water quality and waste management requirements, as well as the expense of closing and maintaining the landfill as it reaches capacity.

So they have been exploring such alternatives as closing the landfill or selling it to a commercial waste company that would expand it and bring in garbage from the region. The recent Amador County Grand Jury report recommended that the county not only continue to operate the landfill, but expand it and accept out-of-county waste.

But residents near the landfill are very wary of potential expansion, considering the landfill’s long history of water quality violations.

Jerry Cassesi, a long-time Jackson Valley resident and former Amador County planning commissioner, says "these violations range from the simplest thing such as failing to cover dead animals with dirt to the much more serious such as failure to control escaping landfill gases and failure to control polluted water leaching from the garbage."

These and other violations were cited in early 2002 in a tentative cease-and-desist order that the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board issued against the county.

At a poorly publicized April 2002 meeting in the Jackson Valley, the supervisors supported the sale of the landfill. Afterwards, Cassesi and other residents began to do more research.

"Much of the information presented at the April meeting proved to be inaccurate," Cassesi says. "For example, we were told that no out-of-county waste is accepted. But records indicate that thousands of dead and diseased chickens from another county were buried at the landfill.

"Records also indicate the some type of aluminum waste product was accepted from a manufacturing plant near Modesto. Both of these out-of-county waste items were approved by the state.

"We were told that loads are inspected as they enter the facility and if the waste is not acceptable the entire load is rejected. But there’s no record of any load ever being rejected."

Residents requested information from the regional water board and the California Integrated Waste Management Board. (IWMB). They found that IWMB records list 161 violations at the landfill from 1998 through 2002.

Some violations were serious, including repeated violations for "failure to control explosive gases" and "failure to control leachate." But the violations did not result in a fine, and neither the landfill operator nor the county held accountable.

"The violations were noted year after year but it was business as usual at the landfill," said Cassesi.

These and other problems have led landfill-area residents to advocate for closing the landfill, not expanding it. They argue that while expansion would increase county revenue, the gains would be short-lived.

"It could cost at least another $220,000 a year to monitor an additional 850,000 tons of waste for 30 years after the landfill closes," Cassesi says. "That amounts to over $6 million in costs to the county. That cost could go up dramatically if there were violations that required clean up or if there were an accident that resulted in a landfill fire."

Instead, Cassesi and other landfill-area residents favor hauling local garbage to a large landfill such as the one at Keifer Boulevard in Sacramento County. Amador County Environmental Services (ACES), the waste company serving large parts of the county, has been doing that for years.

"It is cheaper for ACES to haul to Keifer than it is for them to dump at the Amador County landfill," says Cassesi. "In addition more things from ACES get recycled. For example, more types of plastics picked up by ACES get recycled because the Amador County landfill is not large enough to make that economically feasible."

A decision on the future of the landfill will likely be made in the next few months. If this issue concerns you, be sure to attend the related supervisors meetings and to talk to your own supervisor. You can also contact Jerry Cassesi at 274-4386.