Backlash Over Trash Exports Builds : Landfills: Cities send trainloads of garbage across state lines. A West Virginia showdown is the latest in scores of clashes over the issue.

Last May, Jeffrey Allen, a 31-year-old minister who serves as pastor of the Keystone and Northfork United Methodist Churches not far from here, met seven friends for lunch at the Sterling Drive-In. For an hour they skeptically considered a deal that local politicians had concluded was a godsend.

Welch was on its way to becoming one of the garbage capitals of America.

Out in Lick Branch Hollow, three miles north of town, a Philadelphia company with thousands of acres of land overlying worked-out coal mines, was getting ready to start the granddaddy of all landfills. Into the deep, 800-acre bowl among the mountain ridges, it planned each day to dump a 185-car trainload, 3.5 million tons a year, until the middle of the 21st Century.

In return for taking the garbage, trash, and fly-ash--mostly hauled in from New York and New Jersey--Welch and McDowell counties were promised $6 million to $8 million a year in fees, the use of a new sewage treatment plant to be built by the company and jobs for more than 350 workers with an annual payroll totaling $10 million.

Allen and his friends agreed that the arrangement stunk, but it held powerful appeal to officials of a poor community whose plight has been made desperate by the decline of coal mining in southern West Virginia.

As late as the 1950s, Welch was a robust community of 10,000 residents. Working people had money in their pockets; merchants were prosperous. It had movie theaters, ethnic restaurants, a hotel, a synagogue and a bus and railway station. In 1960, John F. and Robert F. Kennedy, Hubert H. Humphrey and hosts of lesser national figures came here to campaign, and West Virginia gave John Kennedy the votes that turned the tide in his quest for the Democratic presidential nomination.

But in the 1970s and ‘80s, Welch lost two-thirds of its population. Stores have closed, poverty and unemployment have soared and welfare roles have swelled. Increasingly, it has become a town inhabited by stooped retirees from mines now vacant. It is reputed to be the largest community east of the Mississippi without benefit of sewage treatment, its waste grievously polluting the Tug River, which separates West Virginia and Kentucky.

In spite of the region’s financial plight and the considerable enticements offered by the landfill developer, however, the idea of becoming a gigantic repository for waste from the cities of New Jersey and New York exploded into a passionate political issue in the West Virginia mountains.

Five months after the meeting at the Sterling Drive-In and organization of the first grass-roots opposition to the project, a special session of the West Virginia Legislature last month effectively killed the McDowell County landfill, passing a law limiting shipments to 30,000 tons a month rather than the 300,000 proposed by the developer, Capels Resources Inc.

“This was an economic issue with roots going back 100 years,” says Allen, who suddenly has been cast as a West Virginia David against the big city Goliath. “Then, large companies came in, bought the land and took all the coal profits out of the state. Capels Resources wanted to do the same thing, bring in garbage and take the profits back to Philadelphia,” where it is headquartered.

After four years of work and $5 million invested in the site, Capels President Jack Fugett conceded defeat. Had the project been put to a referendum, he insisted, it would have been easily approved. As it was, he concluded, the prospect for a model high-tech regional landfill had been wiped out by local activists in collusion with environmentalists far from McDowell County.

Although national significance was of little concern to Allen and his allies, the showdown in West Virginia last month was but the latest in scores of confrontations brought on by the shortage of landfills in urban areas and the massive export of municipal garbage into rural areas and into financially strapped communities such as Welch.

According to the National Solid Waste Management Assn., 43 states now export garbage for disposal. With dumping fees ranging from less than $20 to more than $100 per ton, more than 10 million tons annually move across state lines, sometimes bound for disposal sites halfway across the country.

New Jersey, with disposal costs 10 times higher than in West Virginia, exports its municipal refuse to 11 other states, as far away as Kansas. New York exports to 13 states. Unless it finds new space within its borders or dramatically reduces its waste volume, New York’s disposal problem will dramatically increase by the end of the decade when it closes its Freshkill landfill, now taking in 14,000 tons per day.

The largest recipients of the New York and New Jersey “produce,” as it has come to be called, are Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. Amid horror stories of leaking and wrecked garbage trucks, Indiana, West Virginia and other states have seen the creation of citizens’ patrols to look out for out-of-state waste trucks and document the traffic.

Faced with angry community opposition, state governments find themselves caught in the middle. In Kansas, the state temporarily closed a landfill 60 miles northwest of Wichita after a New Jersey company bought it and began sending in trainloads of garbage-laden piggybacked trucks. A Florida company has sought to buy a 260-acre site in Greenwood County, Kan., and a Chicago firm has offered Elk County $1 a ton for permission to send 4,000 tons of garbage a day to a privately owned 20-acre rock quarry site.

In Michigan a state law, certain to be tested in court, placed a ban on out-of-county garbage shipments. In the West, the New Mexico Legislature responded to the threat of out-of-state shipments by tightening its landfill regulations.

Governors, including West Virginia’s Gaston Caperton, have been boosted into office on the strength of pledges to stop the traffic, but none has succeeded. Recipient states have been unable to close their borders because the U.S. Supreme Court has deemed garbage a commodity and has ruled that bans against such shipments violate the commerce clause of the Constitution. The National Governors’ Assn., concerned over the potential for serious conflicts between state governments, has called on its members to limit garbage exports and recommended that importing states set fees that would discourage moving garbage across the country.

“The fees,” it said in a study issued last year, “should be high enough so that final disposal costs to the waste exporter are equal to the highest prevailing disposal cost in the exporting state. . . . If such a system fails to resolve interstate waste disputes, the federal government should explore other long-term options, including the use of arbitration, special fines on egregious waste exports and limits on the amount of waste states can ship beyond their borders.”

A few states have taken the association’s suggestion to cooperate in averting political and economic feuding.

In August, Gov. Evan Bayh of Indiana and Gov. James J. Florio of New Jersey signed an agreement to work together in stopping shipments from illegal New Jersey dumps, which have constituted a large part of the garbage traffic between their states. In Indiana, shipments are now regulated by a “sticker law” that requires garbage-haulers to obtain state approval. Meanwhile, in New Jersey, transporters are required to declare their destination when departing with a load of refuse.

Within weeks of the agreement, cooperation between the two states not only reduced the traffic flowing into Indiana, but turned up more than a dozen unlicensed shipments from illegal operations in New Jersey, some of them including batteries and toxic chemicals not permitted in landfills.

Just as the 1990 Clean Air Act dominated the environmental agenda of the 101st Congress, reauthorization of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act is expected to be the transcendent environmental issue when the 102nd Congress convenes for its second session next January.

In recent months, the environmental protection panel of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee has conducted several hearings on amendments to the reauthorization bill, including a session on interstate shipment. Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) said that he plans to complete work on a bill before Congress adjourns this year. At the same time, Rep. Al Swift (D-Wash.), chairman of a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee, has been preparing similar legislation for introduction later this year.

Both measures seek to discourage the long-distance shipment of garbage by setting up a fee schedule designed to make it more expensive to send trash to distant states. The Bush Administration so far is opposing changes in the law, but environmentalists and political analysts expect lawmakers either to alter it or to pass legislation explicitly designed to stop garbage exports.

Nearly 20 bills aimed at restricting the traffic have already been introduced.

Last year, Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.), who made New Jersey garbage the centerpiece of his 1990 election campaign, sponsored a Senate measure giving states the right to ban out-of-state shipments. Coats complained that huge garbage trucks were rolling into his state so rapidly that residents could find copies of the Village Voice newspaper in landfills before New Yorkers received it in the mail.

The Coats provision was killed in conference, however, with New Jersey’s Democratic Sens. Bill Bradley and Frank R. Lautenberg leading the opposition.

Coats recently prepared to attach a similar amendment to a bill elevating the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to Cabinet status. But in a last-minute compromise with Baucus, he agreed to put his proposal on hold until April to give the senator a chance to deal with the issue in the omnibus waste bill.

The garbage export crisis is driven by both economics and the closing of landfills across the country. With state and federal regulations clamping down on leaky and carelessly operated landfills, more than 2,500 have been closed in the last five years. Estimates are that about three-fourths of landfills now in existence will close in the next 20 years.

West Virginia, for example, had 60 approved landfills three years ago. By the end of September, the number was down to 42, and it is expected to be reduced to 16 by Dec. 1. But at the same time that it capped the capacity of landfills in the state at 30,000 tons per month, it extended the deadline for the introduction of clay liners--which prevent contaminants from percolating down--in all state dumps.

Despite defeat of the massive landfill at Welch, giant-sized, high-tech repositories serving large regions are expected to be the wave of the future--in large measure because of regulations recently announced by the EPA.

Working against a court-imposed deadline, the agency last month produced a 250-page regulation that will go into effect next year. It will require landfills to have synthetic liners inside clay barriers and to be equipped with systems to capture, store and treat water that leaches through the trash. They must also provide for continuous monitoring for ground-water contamination and operators must cover the surface of the fill at the end of each day. Moreover, they will be required to continue environmental management of waste sites for 30 years after they are closed and covered over. West Virginia’s cap on landfill size is expected to be signed into law this week.

As the Legislature’s House-Senate conference worked out its final language, Capels Resources President Fugett prepared to go home to Philadelphia, having spent the better part of the last three years in West Virginia.

His company, he said, had been prepared to spend $60 million to $80 million to prepare the site and he had already signed a contract giving the county authority to monitor the project 24 hours a day and to close it any time it was deemed unsafe. No waste facility in the United States, he said, would have been subject to closer scrutiny.

But Allen and his supporters viewed the outcome as something much more important than preventing a landfill that they regarded as too large.

“This is a rare kind of issue that comes along only once in a very great while,” said state Rep. David Grubb, chairman of the environmental group West Virginia Citizen Action, and one of the spearheads against the McDowell County project. “It is one of those things that so fundamentally divides a community that it changes the whole political structure.”

The good news from the state capital in Charleston moved Jeffrey Allen and his supporters to decide upon keeping active the grass-roots organization that seven people set in motion at the Sterling Drive-In.

Having won the the landfill fight, they said, TEARS (for Team Effort Against Ruining Southern West Virginia) will now turn to other community projects, including finding state and federal money for a sewage treatment plant.