Ranchers Protest Planned Landfill on Indian Reservation

A dump site on the Campo Indian Reservation would ruin the ground water supply and thus devastate the rural east San Diego County lifestyle, a group of ranchers told state and county officials Monday.

“East County will be known as Boot Hill, California,” said Barbara Sparks, who runs a cattle ranch in Boulevard, next to the Mexican border, with her husband, Marvin. “No matter how you line it, it’s going to leak, that’s all there is to it. If this dump goes in, death is all that’s left.”

Sparks’ comments came during six hours of public hearings at the Alpine Community Center attended by ranchers, rural dwellers and representatives of the Campo Band of Mission Indians.

Most of the ranchers who packed the small room were there to assail the proposed 600-acre solid waste landfill--the first such proposal pending under newly adopted state standards covering such facilities on Indian land. But state and local environmental officials and Indian representatives countered that they would attempt to prevent such serious problems.

“We also share the concerns about the water,” said Paul Helliker, a spokesman for the California Environmental Protection Agency who came from Sacramento for the hearings. “The state will make every effort we can to make sure no hazardous waste appears there.”

Michael Connolly, chairman of the Campo Environmental Protection Agency, the tribe’s own watchdog group, said his people are demanding that stringent controls, at least equal to those required by the state, be in place before any waste arrives.

“This is our land and we are more at risk than anyone,” Connolly said. “Our tribe does not want to harm its land. We live there and it is all we have.”

Monday’s hearings were the latest round in a nearly 5-year-old battle pitting the Campo Indians against the neighboring ranchers in the mountainous country that surrounds the 15,480-acre reservation, which sprawls from Interstate 8 to the Mexican border. Although no final decision is expected until October, the landfill proposal calls for accepting about 3,000 tons of trash a day for up to 35 years.

Many of the ranchers at the meeting have joined a grass-roots organization called Backcountry Against Dump, or BAD.

The battle lines were drawn in 1990, as soon as the Indian band let it be known they were receptive to the idea of a dump on their land, Connolly said.

“We announced two years ago that we were going through the selection process for a county landfill. Two days later BAD was formed,” Connolly said.

Donna Tisdale, a cattle rancher whose 140-acre spread is near Boulevard but sprawls along a ridge next to the reservation, is the president of BAD. Members have attended nearly every hearing up and down the state on the issue, Tisdale said.

For BAD, the bottom line is ground water, she claims.

“We are 100% ground water dependent with no hope of imported water ever,” said Tisdale. She and her husband, Ed, pump water from several wells on their property. Because the nearest water line is 45 miles away in Alpine, “any threat to the ground water is a threat to us,” Tisdale said.

Because of the fractured bed rock that makes up the east San Diego County countryside, contamination to the ground water can come from anywhere, even miles away, Tisdale claims.

“The point is, all experts say do not put a landfill in fractured bed rock,” Tisdale argues. “As opposed to an aquifer, where water is trapped in sand, water winds through fractured rock. It’s virtually impossible to keep track of what’s happening or to monitor the flow.”

BAD’s initial attack on the dump site proposal came through the state legislature and the office of Assemblyman Steve Peace (D-Rancho San Diego). With the urging of some environmentalists and ranchers, Peace sponsored a bill that sought to require state inspection and approval for waste projects built on any of California’s 108 reservations, which otherwise fell under less stringent federal environmental law.

Led by the Campo tribe, Indian leaders fought the bill vigorously, claiming it was a violation of their sovereignty. After months of intense negotiations, however, a compromise bill was passed last September and signed into law by Gov. Pete Wilson in January.

The new bill gives Indians the right to sign a cooperative agreement that adopts the stricter state standards and allows state inspection, but gives the various tribes the responsibility to enforce the environmental standards.

The bill opened the door for such an agreement between the Campo tribe and Mid-American Waste Systems of Columbus, Ohio, a national waste disposal company that operates 14 landfills in five states. Working with the tribe, the company has proposed operating a 400-acre landfill on the 600-acre site, as well as a recycling recovery center and a composting center.