State Cites Ranch as Illegal Dump : Malibu: The owner is ordered to submit plan for cleanup of toxic materials that officials say may threaten water supply.

The owner of a 320-acre ranch in Malibu’s Encinal Canyon has been accused by state officials of allowing the illegal dumping of toxic wastes on his property, which officials say may pose a threat to drinking water in the area.

In an unusual enforcement action against a private landowner, the California Regional Water Quality Control Board has ordered Lester G. Richman, owner of the Juma Ranch, to submit a plan to remove potentially hazardous chemicals and debris from the property.

“There is obviously a lot of material that shouldn’t be there and that needs to be cleaned up,” said Dick Harris, the agency’s assistant executive officer.

State officials have described the ranch, in the Santa Monica Mountains about five miles from the Pacific Ocean, as a burial ground for discarded washing machines, refrigerators, degreasing tanks, and other miscellaneous metal objects.

Investigators said that several acres near a small pond on the property had been used as a dump for hundreds of 55-gallon gasoline drums and leaking heavy equipment, including street sweepers, earth-moving equipment, tank cars, flatbed trucks and rusted automobiles.

An agency spokesman said that investigators discovered potentially hazardous wastes lying atop unprotected soil at the ranch after an anonymous tipster complained that the ranch’s caretaker had been admitting trucks loaded with construction wastes onto the property, and that the trucks were empty when they left.

“It was really an amazing array of stuff,” said Mercedes Murillo, who investigated the site for the water quality control board last December and who has since become an employee of Los Angeles County. “You name it and it was there.”

Last month, the agency issued a cleanup and abatement order, giving Richman until last Friday to submit a cleanup plan. However, agency officials said they have received no response. By law, the agency has the authority to seek civil penalties of up to $5,000 a day against violators who do not cooperate once they have been ordered to do so.

Richman, a Santa Barbara attorney, was said to be vacationing with his family and could not be reached. He and his family are said to use a two-story house on the property as a weekend and holiday retreat. A caretaker at the ranch, meanwhile, dismissed as “ridiculous” the idea that the property was being used as a toxic dump.

“That’s really funny. I mean, that’s ridiculous,” said Bobbie Gonzalez, who said she and her husband, Ray, have raised cattle at the ranch and and served as its caretakers for 22 years.

“There are some old vehicles around, but they’re clunkers that some of the ranch hands have abandoned once they stopped running,” she said. “As for the oil drums and the other stuff, that’s just stuff you use when you operate a ranch.”

Gonzalez said that the “the only trucks coming in and out of here on a regular basis have been loaded with cow manure” as part of an effort to improve the grazing land for the two dozen head of cattle she and her husband own.

“This is not some kind of after-dark dumping ground for toxic waste that you read about,” she said. “This happens to be our home. We’ve raised three kids here.”

Rod Nelson, who heads the water quality control board’s landfills division, said that the agency’s primary concern is to determine what, if any, damage may have been caused to the water table.

“You’re talking about a site that’s in the upper portion of a canyon where there are a lot of private water wells used for irrigation and drinking water,” he said. “That’s an important concern.”

Nelson said that Richman will be required to pay for testing to find out whether waste discharges have damaged soils or surface water on the ranch, and, if so, he will be required to remedy the damage.

Agency officials said that the case represents one of the few instances where the water quality control board has initiated an enforcement action against a private landowner.

“Most of our enforcement is geared toward commercial entities that must be regulated by law,” Harris said. “Unless we get a specific complaint, we don’t have the resources to scour the countryside looking for individual violations of the (state) water code.”