2nd Review of Landfill Operator Is Questioned : Environment: Officials are concerned that a Seattle law firm quietly hired by the county to report on Waste Management Inc. may be too sympathetic to the company.

Ventura County has quietly hired a Seattle law firm to conduct a second background investigation of a company that wants to build a landfill near Ventura, prompting a county supervisor and the district attorney to question the behind-the-scenes process and the law firm’s impartiality.

“It’s a little strange. I smell a rat,” Supervisor Maria VanderKolk said last week.

The county’s Solid Waste Management Department signed a $21,000 contract with the Seattle firm on March 4 to check the status of criminal and civil cases against Waste Management Inc., the nation’s largest trash company, and to report on its landfill operations in California.

VanderKolk said the Board of Supervisors should have reviewed the contract first, since the proposed Weldon Canyon landfill has sparked so much opposition in nearby Ojai Valley.

“Given the political sensitivity and the emotion of the issue, the contract should have been discussed before the board,” she said. “It’s just stupidity not to do these things publicly.”

Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury said he is concerned not only because the contract was awarded without public review but because of possible bias on the part of Seattle law firm Culp, Guterson & Grader in favor of Waste Management.

“We have been alerted by the San Diego County district attorney’s office that the law firm has very close ties to Waste Management, and we should view any (report) with a great deal of skepticism,” Bradbury said.

San Diego County Dist. Atty. Edwin Miller, who recently issued a highly critical report on Waste Management, could not be reached for comment. And Bradbury said Friday that he could not reveal the specifics of his conversation with Miller.

Bradbury also said he thought it was odd that county managers approved the new contract without first contacting the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department, which outlined Waste Management’s history of legal problems last summer for the Board of Supervisors.

“It’s something that we probably should have been asked to look at before it was done,” Sheriff John Gillespie said of the new contract.

Kay Martin, the county’s solid waste management director, said she didn’t present the law firm’s contract to the supervisors before approval because the fee was less than $25,000 and review was not required.

County supervisors were told of the contract in a March 23 memo from Chief Administrative Officer Richard Wittenberg, who said he had prior knowledge of the deal. Martin met with a detective who conducted the sheriff’s study at about the same time, she said.

Martin said Culp, Guterson & Grader was her clear choice since it had done a nationwide study of Waste Management for the city of Seattle in 1989. Gillespie’s report was partly based on that study, Martin said, adding that she was impressed by the report’s thoroughness and evenhanded approach.

“They had the most extensive background on Waste Management, so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel for us,” she said.

Martin said a second study was needed here so county supervisors will have complete information when they vote on Waste Management’s Weldon Canyon proposal this summer.

The sheriff’s report issued in September generally was limited to a summary of government cases against Waste Management and its subsidiaries. The report found that the company had paid $52.3 million in fines during the 1980s and listed 10 criminal and 23 civil antitrust cases against the company. But it found no link between Waste Management officials and organized crime.

The new study, while updating information on Waste Management’s legal problems, will be most valuable as a gauge of how well the company has run its seven landfills in this state, including the Simi Valley Landfill, Martin said.

“Our experience with Waste Management and the Simi Valley Landfill is exemplary. They’ve been a superior operator,” she said. “I’d like to see what the experiences are in other jurisdictions.”

Martin’s agency is negotiating a contract with Waste Management in case supervisors approve development of the Weldon Canyon landfill, which would become the only dump in western Ventura County if Bailard Landfill is closed on schedule in 1993.

Martin said she had no qualms about unilaterally contracting with the Seattle law firm because it is widely respected and Seattle officials were pleased with its 1989 study.

She questioned whether San Diego County prosecutor Miller has been objective in warning recently that public agencies should use “extreme caution “ in dealing with Waste Management.

“I think San Diego County has made it clear they do not want Waste Management as an operator, and whether or not this has colored the methodology and conclusions of their study I don’t know,” Martin said.

Despite Miller’s warning to Bradbury, Martin said she has found no evidence of a relationship between Culp, Guterson & Grader and Waste Management.

“I would put the credentials of this law firm up against any,” she said. “We feel very comfortable in dealing with them and their reputation.”

Richard Yarmuth, the firm’s lead attorney for both the Seattle and Ventura studies, denied that his company has ever worked for Waste Management.

“Before I did the Seattle report, neither I nor anyone in my law firm had ever met anyone from Waste Management,” Yarmuth said.

His firm has had no subsequent contact with the company except as Seattle’s negotiator after that city hired Waste Management as its trash hauler, the attorney said.

Seattle City Council President George Benson, who chaired the committee that hired Yarmuth’s firm after a competitive bid, said the firm’s report was “good, in-depth, objective.”

The report reflected prior findings by the City Council’s staff, city utility department officials and the city attorney’s office, Benson said. Waste Management finally won the $400-million, 30-year contract over two competitors whose backgrounds were also studied by the law firm, Benson said.

“This was a unanimous decision,” Benson said. “But we were faced with the same thing Ventura County is faced with. We heard these reports from all over the United States about what Waste Management had done, and we checked them out.”

Seattle found that Waste Management had bought numerous companies under state or federal investigation and facing large fines during the 1980s. It paid the fines, fired corrupt employees and implemented reforms, Benson said.

“I got letters from mayors all over the Middle West and East repeating the same story,” Benson said. Seattle has had no problems with its Waste Management contract, he said.

However, the recent San Diego County report noted that a Waste Management subsidiary serving Seattle was charged in 1990 with failing to pay nearly $400,000 in utility taxes to the city. Failure to pay the taxes continued for at least three years after Waste Management bought the company, the report said.

Former Seattle Councilwoman Virginia Galle, a leading critic of Waste Management in 1989, said she was not impressed by Yarmuth’s analysis.

“I thought it was superficial,” she said. “I didn’t learn anything new.”

Yarmuth’s 65-page report, prepared in about two weeks at the city’s request, described in detail Waste Management subsidiaries’ past problems with enforcement agencies. It listed several criminal antitrust convictions since 1980; 14 civil antitrust actions; two cases in which employees were found guilty of bribery, and numerous violations of environmental regulations.

But Yarmuth also pointed out that Waste Management had more than 500 subsidiaries in North America that employed 27,000 people.

“In evaluating the company, it is important to note the size of the company,” the report said. “Waste Management appears to have improved its compliance record over the period reviewed.

“The company,” the report said, “has instituted internal measures to encourage environmental compliance, including linking management pay increases to satisfactory environmental compliance. We have also learned of situations where Waste Management reported violations of environmental standards at its own facilities and cooperated in costly remedial efforts.”

In comments to the Seattle City Council, Yarmuth gave all three competing firms a clean bill of health.

“As a citizen, there is nothing in this report that would make me uncomfortable with any of these companies contracting with the city of Seattle,” he said.

Yarmuth’s analysis of Waste Management’s practices contrasts sharply with the report released two weeks ago by San Diego County’s Miller.

In a report requested by the Board of Supervisors, the district attorney’s staff scolded the trash company for its history of environmental lapses, public corruption and attempts to “gain undue influence over government officials.”

“Waste Management, Inc.’s methods of doing business and history of civil and criminal violations has established a predictable pattern which has been fairly consistent over a significant number of years,” the report said.

“We have reviewed recent practices and problems and our concerns have not diminished,” the report said. “The company’s recent business practices and violations do not appear to be different from the past.”

Miller’s report concluded that the company’s method of lobbying, including a $50,000 donation to a nonprofit San Diego sailing foundation headed by County Supervisor Brian Bilbray, “suggests an unseemly effort . . . to manipulate local government for its own business ends.”

Waste Management officials said the San Diego report “provided no new information and was replete with inaccurate statements and half-truths taken out of context.”

J. Steven Bergerson, the corporation’s general counsel, described as “particularly malicious and scurrilous” parts of the report that linked organized crime to companies that were later acquired by Waste Management.

The San Diego investigation found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing by the company.

In response, Waste Management announced that it had hired the large Los Angeles law firm of O’Melveny & Myers to conduct its own “impartial investigation” and to compare its findings with the San Diego report.

In a press release, Waste Management mentioned two prior inquiries into its activities that it considers objective, including Yarmuth’s Seattle study.

Yarmuth’s study for Ventura County was originally due April 15, but has been delayed to make the information more topical at hearings before the Board of Supervisors this summer, he said.

At the supervisors’ meeting Tuesday, VanderKolk said she wants to discuss why supervisors were not told of the second Waste Management study before it was approved.

“Even forgetting about any cozy relationship by the law firm (with Waste Management), we should have known in advance,” she said. “If you don’t bring everything out publicly, there’s a sense that something shady is going on.”

Supervisors Maggie Erickson Kildee and John K. Flynn said last week that they were not concerned that Martin had approved the new study without their knowledge.

“The key is getting the information we need,” Erickson Kildee said. “There’s no point in making a hoopla about it.”