Debate Ignited by Proposal to Burn Old Tires in Rialto

A proposal to build a $70-million waste-to-energy plant that would burn 9 million tires a year in this Riverside County community has touched off heated controversy throughout the Inland Empire and raised calls for revised air quality standards in the region.

In recent weeks, San Bernardino County and Riverside County supervisors and city councils throughout the Inland Empire have protested plans for the plant, which they fear would spread more pollutants into already smoggy skies.

Despite the strong opposition, the company behind the project, Garb Oil and Power of Salt Lake City, has met nearly all legal requirements, and opponents, including a host of homeowner associations and state legislators, may be unable to stop the project.

‘First Magnitude’ Disaster

“If this plant goes in, it threatens to turn air quality in western Riverside and San Bernardino counties into a disaster of the first magnitude--which it almost already is,” said Sen. Robert Presley (D-Riverside).

Presley presided over a legislative hearing Monday in San Bernardino that focused on the South Coast Air Quality Management District’s “exchange of-credits” system, which Garb Oil is using in its attempt to win approval of the plant from the pollution-control agency.

Under the system, a new industry may literally buy the right to pollute the air by purchasing “smog credits” from companies elsewhere in the South Coast basin that have closed down or installed equipment to reduce their own emissions, air quality officials said.

The value of these credits is reduced the further they are moved from their original source. As a result, the officials say, the buyer winds up polluting less than the credits are worth.

In this way, the total amount of air pollution in the South Coast basin is kept below a certain threshold--despite the addition of new industries in a given region, the air quality officials said.

But Presley calls the credit system “ridiculous and dangerous” and said “perhaps we need to change these rules.”

The Garb Oil issue is complicated by a law passed by the Legislature during the 1981 energy crunch. It declared that a “resource recovery project,” such a tire-burning plant, did not have to buy enough credits to offset all of its emissions if it had made a “good faith effort” to do so, officials said.

That law was repealed in January--after Garb Oil filed its application to construct the tire-burning plant. After Jan. 1, a company was required to purchase all the credits needed to offset its emissions.

As it stands, although Garb Oil has asked thousands of companies in the South Coast basin to sell some of their available credits, it has only managed to acquire about a fourth of the number needed to compensate for the amount of emissions expected to be generated by the project, San Bernardino County officials said.

‘Good Faith Effort’

Nonetheless, in the view of the company, and some air quality officials, that constitutes the legal “good faith effort” required at the time Garb Oil applied for its construction permit.

“I think whether the district denies or approves the project there should be consistency in the law,” said Jeb Stuart, former executive officer of the South Coast Air Quality Management District and now a paid consultant to Garb Oil. “I don’t think it is appropriate for a regulatory agency to selectively deny a project on the basis of public controversy.”

Garb Oil acknowledges that the plant would produce about 640 tons of pollutants a year. But it says the plant would be safe for local residents, produce electricity for 30,000 homes and create hundreds of jobs in the area.

Garb Oil President John Brewer said he “checked” the cities of Commerce, Fontana, Irwindale and Vernon before settling on Rialto as an ideal home for the tire-burning plant.

Easy Access

The Rialto site, he said, is properly zoned, near a sewage treatment plant, which could provide coolant water, power lines and major access highways.

As for tires, Southern California scraps 457 million pounds of automobile and truck tires a year, he said.

“I think the whole damn controversy is ridiculous. The plant would not present a problem,” Brewer said. “We know from a legal standpoint we are right.”

The nearest homes to the proposed plant, Brewer said, are “upwind” and most of the pollution would be “dissipated over miles and miles with most of it falling on the San Bernardino Mountains north of us.”

Council Takes No Stand

In the midst of the uproar, the Rialto City Council has not taken a public stand on the issue and, to the chagrin of neighboring communities, has not required that an environmental impact report be prepared on the project.

“If the company legally meets all state and federal requirements what right does a locality have to say that it can’t come in?” asked Rialto City Administrator Homer Bludau.

“Rialto’s position is if they can satisfy those agencies, it will allow them to come in.”

Like Brewer, Bludau blames “misinformation” for much of the controversy.

“Tire burning conjures images of clouds of black smoke belching out of furnaces,” Bludau said. “But Garb Oil isn’t spending $70 million to stack up 27,000 tires a day and set a match to them.”

Sophisticated Process

Indeed, Brewer said the plant will operate with a sophisticated incineration process currently used in at least three other co-generation plants in California, which burn coal and wood instead of tires.

Shredded tires would be hauled to the Rialto plant and burned in an incinerator at a high temperature. Heat and steam produced in the process would be used to operate electrical generators. The electricity generated would be purchased by Southern California Edison.

There are signs that Riverside County officials may deny permission for Garb Oil to build the separate tire shredding facility. For example, Riverside County Supervisor Melba Dunlap, in whose district the shredding plant would be located, proposed the county’s resolution against the Rialto co-generation plant.

“There is immense community opposition to the tire shredding plant,” said Michael Lafferty, Dunlap’s administrative assistant. However, he added, “at present, we are taking a neutral stand until all environmental reports on the tire shredding project come in.”

Brewer said if he is blocked in Riverside, “I’ve got a 100-mile radius in which to put the tire shredding plant.”

At the legislative hearing Monday, Arthur M. Winer, assistant director of the statewide Air Pollution Research Center at the University of California, Riverside, questioned the wisdom of allowing construction of a large waste incinerator in what he described as “the most heavily impacted airshed in the country.”

Incineration facilities, he added, sometimes experience deviations in operating conditions that can produce “large clouds of highly toxic materials” such as dioxins in greater quantities “than those emitted during weeks or even months of normal operation.”

Plans for the tire-burning project have been before regulatory agencies since 1984. Opponents prematurely declared victory on June 30 when air quality officials denied Garb Oil’s request for a permit to build the plant on a deserted 22-acre lot at the corner of Riverside Avenue and Industrial Avenue, about three miles north of the Riverside city limits.

sh Risk Assessment Air quality officials based their decision on a risk assessment of the project supplied by Garb Oil, which showed it would create a cancer risk 16 times greater than the maximum allowable one cancer case per 1 million people over a 70-year period.

“These guys gave us their heads on a golden platter,” said an air quality official, who spoke on condition that his name not be used.

But Garb Oil immediately appealed the decision on grounds that its report had “errors in the mathematics,” Brewer said.

Brewer said a new report is being prepared that will show the project would create a “.5 to .7 chance in a million of causing cancer,” which would be well within air quality standards.

Hearing on Aug. 14

A hearing on the appeal has been scheduled for Aug. 14 at the Ontario City Council chambers, said Ron Ketcham, spokesman for the South Coast Air Quality Management District.

“We will grant a permit if the hearing board is satisfied that the risk is acceptable,” Ketcham predicted.

That prospect has sent elected officials throughout the Inland Empire in search of ways to stop or stall the project.

On Monday, San Bernardino Councilman Steve Marks asked the City Council to join the county supervisors in filing legal action against the Air Quality Management District to force an environmental impact report on the project.

“We the public set up an institution like the Air Quality Management District to protect us from pollutants and poor air and they are not doing it,” Marks said.

Brewer said the call for an EIR is an attempt to delay and kill the project.

“It takes six to nine months to do an EIR and that would kill the project because we have a contract with Southern California Edison that requires us to start delivering electricity by the end of 1988,” Brewer said. To meet that deadline, he said, “we have to start construction before the end of the year.”