Firm Agrees to Help Clean Up Tijuana Site : Pollution: Settlement calls for U.S. company to spend $2.5 million in a notorious lead waste case. Environmentalists question the deal.

A company has agreed to pay $2.5 million to help clean a notorious site near Tijuana contaminated with 31 million pounds of lead waste from the Los Angeles area, it was announced Tuesday.

At a news conference attended by nearly a dozen environmental officials and prosecutors from Mexico, Los Angeles County and the state of California, Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti also said that criminal charges have been filed against an Orange County man and two others allegedly responsible for abandoning the waste, which accumulated over a three-year period.

A Mexican official lauded the settlement and the criminal charges, saying they are indicative of the kind of effective cooperation possible under the proposed North American Free Trade Agreement between Mexico, the United States and Canada.

But environmental activists were cautious in their support.

Some said the relatively swift resolution of the case is part of a public relations move by the Mexican government designed to smooth over concerns that if the free trade agreement is approved, Mexico will become a dumping ground for American firms.

“The only reason the Mexican government has moved forward this fast on this case is because of the political problem (the site) has caused in Washington,” said Craig Merrilees, director of the California Fair Trade Campaign, a consortium of U.S. and Mexican environmental and social groups that oppose the agreement in its present form.

“What this case actually proves is that the Mexican regime responds primarily to political pressure and public relations concerns rather than institute systematic, tough enforcement,” Merrilees said.

The $2.5 million, he said, falls far short of what is needed to clean up the 14-acre site just east of Tijuana, near the settlement of El Florido and a dairy farm. A lead smelting operation had been run there since the 1970s by Alco Pacific Inc., a company founded by Morris P. Kirk, who now lives in San Clemente.

The site was closed by the Mexican government in 1991 after El Florido residents and environmentalists complained about it repeatedly.

For Merrilees and other activists, the site is a symbol of environmental abuse and the failure of the Mexican government to enforce its own environmental rules. The site gained international attention during the Earth Summit held last summer in Rio de Janeiro.

At the news conference, Santiago Onate Laborde, Mexico’s attorney general for the environment, defended his government’s record of handling environmental violations. Of 10,000 toxic waste cases handled by his agency, he said, only three involved American firms.

“We have accomplished a significant type of cooperation” with the resolution of the Alco Pacific case, he said. “We are not talking about the future” and the trade pact, he said. “We are talking about the present.”

Onate acknowledged, however, that it will take as much as 10 times the $2.5 million Garcetti’s office got from the Dallas-based RSR Inc. to clean up the Alco Pacific site. The Mexican government, he said, is prepared to provide the remaining money.

According to Garcetti, the waste originated with RSR Inc., which bills itself as the largest auto battery recycler in the world. It has operations in the City of Industry under the name Quemetco.

Quemetco, Garcetti said, hired Alco Pacific Corp., then based in Carson, to transport lead from the batteries to its smelting operation in Mexico, where the lead was supposed to be processed and the salvageable material returned to RSR. Garcetti said Alco Pacific illegally transported the material on California roads and abandoned it in Mexico after doing little or no processing.

RSR pleaded no contest to three misdemeanor counts of illegally transporting hazardous materials and agreed to pay $2.5 million. Of the amount, $300,000 will go to the United States-Mexico Border Progress Foundation for medical monitoring of people who may have been affected by the lead waste.

Kirk, 62, the owner of Alco Pacific, was charged along with two employees with illegally transporting hazardous waste. Kirk’s lawyer, Jerome A. Busch, said his client will plead not guilty at his arraignment next month.

Albert Lospinoso, president of RSR, said his company agreed to the settlement with Garcetti’s office only to avoid expensive litigation. He denied that Alco Pacific failed to process the materials. He said that over a two-year period, half of the materials sent to Mexico were processed and returned to RSR.