Panel OKs Limits on Reservation Dumps

Swayed by emotional pleas from San Diego County residents and hints of lead poisoning in Riverside County, an initially skeptical Senate committee Thursday approved a bill that would force California Indian tribes to comply with state environmental rules when building garbage dumps on their sovereign lands.

Thursday’s committee hearing before the Senate Toxics and Public Safety Management Committee provided the toughest test yet for the measure, sponsored by Assemblyman Steve Peace (D-La Mesa) and inspired by the controversy surrounding plans by the impoverished Campo tribe of Mission Indians to put a solid waste landfill on a small portion of its southeast San Diego County reservation.

Initial questions by committee chairman Sen. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles) seemed to indicate that the measure faced overwhelming odds because of a legal opinion by the Legislature’s own attorney that the proposal would run afoul of federal law, which has long held that American Indians are sovereign and need only comply with federal regulations. As a result, Indian reservations are exempt from local zoning requirements and state income taxes.

But the momentum of the lengthy hearing shifted when Peace offered a parade of sometimes emotional witnesses to buttress his arguments that the Campo case is part of a nationwide strategy by large solid waste companies to use Indian sovereignty as a way around strict state and local standards for hazardous waste sites and garbage dumps.

He said that the state has a legitimate interest to make sure dumps on Indian lands don’t endanger other Californians living nearby, and added that offering tribes less than equal environmental protection than their non-Indian neighbors would be treating American Indians as “second-class citizens.”

To demonstrate the potential danger, Riverside County Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard Nixon testified that he is conducting a criminal investigation into allegations that an unregulated hazardous waste dump on an Indian reservation is leeching lead into the soil and water. The Bureau of Indian Affairs promised to perform an environmental study of the dump but never got around to it, he said.

“We have looked at an area on an Indian reservation that is highly environmentally sensitive,” Nixon said, declining to name the tribe. “It is adjacent to a flood channel, it is in an overflow area. It is upgradient to several dairy farmers and upwind to several produce farms.

“The urgency involved right now is that the lead, which is highly hazardous waste, will percolate through the land into the ground water and the ground water will flow through the dairies and feed off into well water,” Nixon said. “The effects of this can be devastating.”

Residents of Boulevard, in southeast San Diego County, echoed those concerns, arguing that the dump now proposed by the Campo Indians would be next to their ground water supply. Although the tribe has promised to take no hazardous materials into the dump, household toxins and cleaners are routinely thrown away and pose a threat to health, they said.

The most poignant moment came when 70-year-old Catherine Saubel, a Cahuilla Indian from the San Diego-area Los Coyotes reservation, said the bill was necessary to “stop the exploitation” of her tribe, which is also entertaining the idea of leasing its land for a dump.

“They are told by their so-called leaders to accept controversial enterprises such as landfills by waving dollar bills in front of their eyes,” said Saubel, her testimony creating a hush in the hearing room. “When it is too late, the Indians will realize what they gave up: The land they valued so much before--the clean water, the unpolluted water, even facing the possibility of themselves and their children becoming sick from the fumes of the landfill.”

Opponents of the Peace bill, including representatives of the Campo tribe, tried using logic and legal precedent to kill the bill.

They argued that the San Diego County Indians are working hard to make sure they meet or exceed state environmental standards for the proposed 600-acre dump. They are negotiating contracts to hire San Diego County health and air pollution authorities to perform spot inspections and review reports from the landfill, which will be operated by a private company.

Despite the legal arguments, the senators voted 5 to 1 to pass the Peace bill, which now goes to the full Senate for consideration.