Boon to Bane
City officials welcomed Halaco Engineering to a beach on the community’s southern tip 35 years ago.
In a city then thirsting for growth, the metal recycler seemed a good fit: The site was a former dump, it was far from where people lived and from potable ground water, and the company would bring dozens of new jobs.
Now, however, the factory and the huge slag heap growing next to it are viewed as the biggest environmental thorn in the city’s side. The 40-foot slag heap--a charcoal-colored mesa of waste--sits next to where waves boom onto the shore and endangered least terns and snowy plovers hop amid the dunes.
Almost from the time it began operating in 1970, the 41-acre facility with the mountain of slag has fended off court battles, jabs from regulators and neighbors who complain the place is making them sick.
Halaco has always prevailed by fighting aggressively, bombarding opponents with reams of paper and sticking to its argument that it is within its permit and has a right--even a duty--to operate.
Now, however, Halaco is facing the most serious threat yet to its survival from a recent flurry of regulatory and legal actions. A well-funded Santa Barbara-based environmental group, ChannelKeeper, has filed a lawsuit alleging Halaco is releasing toxic materials into the air and water.
A state water board could shut the company down if it can prove that Halaco is releasing ammonia-laced water into nearby wetlands and is refusing to clean it up. And Halaco says a decision by the county’s Air Pollution Control District requiring the plant to meet stricter pollution-control standards for two new furnaces could mean the end for the facility.
Halaco officials are seeking a federal court’s permission to overturn that decision, arguing that it’s an impossible goal to meet and that it could put them out of business.
“It doesn’t mean we’ll go bankrupt in a month or two, or six months,” said Arthur Fine, the firm’s attorney and son of one of the co-owners. “But it means we run a real risk.”
No one can remember any huge outcry when the city approved Halaco’s location on the beachfront off Perkins Road.
Slag Heap Grows Despite Assurances
The area was zoned heavy industrial. And 35 years ago, when sewer plants and power stations were beginning to dot the seaside, no one in the city thought it was a problem to have a metal recycler sitting on prime beach property.
The facility takes aluminum and magnesium scrap, melts it down and recycles it, then sells it to car companies and soda bottlers. The company now employs about 50 people and annual sales exceed $10 million, said plant manager Dave Gable. Halaco is owned by a handful of partners, including Les Fine, who helped bring it to Oxnard.
Millions of pounds of soda and beer cans--as well as Volkswagen engine blocks and parts of Chevrolet Suburban steering wheels--move through the foundry each year. The waste products--the impurities that are washed off prior to smelting--are pumped into three large waste ponds, and then are piled in a huge powdery slag heap once they dry into a residue.
When the site opened, then-Vice President Les Fine promised the slag heap wouldn’t grow. It has.
It is a veritable mountain of waste and muck, the byproduct and residue of years and years of recycling metals: 1.5 billion pounds of dirt, salts, aluminum, magnesium, other heavy metals such as chromium and copper, and a trace, regulators say, of a radioactive material called thorium.
“You see water leaking out of their slag heap into the wetlands,” said Drew Bohan, executive director of ChannelKeeper. “There’s this lunar landscape mound, and beneath it, this unmistakable dead zone.”
He says foggy smoke leaks from the plant and hugs the ground. Neighbors and employees at the nearby sewage treatment plant complain that foul black dust flies into the air, hurts their throats and makes them cough.
Kesa Ryona, who lives in the Surfside III condominiums in Port Hueneme to the west of the facility, has helped found a neighborhood group opposed to Halaco. About 25 members showed up at a pollution control district meeting April 10 to demand more attention. Ryona has started a petition to put pressure on regulators and visited the poor neighborhoods of farm workers to the north that she says are most affected by the plant.
Her family doesn’t swim at the beach anymore, and she leaves the windows closed even when it’s hot. Ryona says her older daughter wakes up every day with a cough.
At John Barber’s skating rink on Hueneme Road north of Halaco, the kids come in demanding to know what is causing the terrible smell. The apartment building owned by Russell and Elizabeth Tracy gets covered in a black dirt that they swear is coming from the plant, and that they must vacuum and wipe up daily. Black soot dusts their cars and windowpanes.
“You’d not believe what comes off my neck. You could swear I had been working in a manufacturing company,” Elizabeth Tracy said. “If this is happening to my skin, what am I breathing in?”
Meanwhile, the slag heap keeps getting higher.
Several years ago, the company carted some of the slag off to Bailard Landfill north of Oxnard as fill dirt.
But nobody has asked for it since, and the pile could grow indefinitely, said Dave Gable, Halaco’s site manager.
Ann Miller, whose Surfside III condo has the closest view of the Halaco plant, said it has blocked some of her coastal view.
“I see the children playing in the water that comes off it,” Miller said. “You begin to think you’re living in that [“Erin Brockovich”] movie.”
The Environmental Protection Agency sued in 1980, saying that the facility was discharging waste into the wetlands.
Rulings Favor Metal Recycler
Eight years later, after a series of claims and counterclaims, the state Supreme Court ruled in Halaco’s favor, saying that the agency had doctored some of its paperwork. In 1986, the same court rejected the California Coastal Commission’s argument that Halaco should be required to follow tighter pollution standards instead of the looser conditions it has followed since its inception.
Halaco has operated unfettered since these rulings, arguing that its operating conditions have been “grandfathered in” to current codes and therefore the company shouldn’t be hit with more stringent requirements. And, Halaco executives say, no matter what anyone else argues, they haven’t contaminated the land.
The firm has not shied away from hardball legal tactics. The company fights hard before regulators, and when a decision goes against it, often immediately takes its case to the courts.
Last year, Halaco filed a lawsuit taking aim at Ventura County Air Pollution Control District officials Dick Baldwin and Karl Krause, alleging they had overstepped their roles as county bureaucrats by attempting to run Halaco out of business.
The lawsuit is still pending.
And in a letter to the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board, Fine warned that board members might be liable for imposing unconstitutional restrictions on Halaco’s operating permit, arguing that the board’s regulatory actions are illegal. Fine, who is a lawyer, defends these legal tactics.
“We certainly hope they’re not” trying to put us out of business, Fine said. “They’re trying to do their jobs. But in this case, they’re trying to do something that’s inappropriate.”
While forced to make some adjustments, Halaco is still operating much the way it did three decades ago--if at lesser capacity--because it is not breaking the law, Fine says. But the biggest legal challenge yet may be its battle in federal court to overturn a recent Air Pollution Control District decision.
The county agency is trying to force Halaco to accept a more stringent pollution standard before granting an operating permit for two new rotary furnaces the company would like to add to help melt down its products. The district says it’s merely requiring the best available technology as mandated by federal law.
Halaco says the agency is mistaken, and the standards it’s seeking aren’t possible for the type of work Halaco does. The requirements for the new furnaces would vastly reduce the amount of particulate matter--the little bits of dust that can cause respiratory problems--that could blow into the air, pollution officials say.
The permit fight is still ongoing, and Halaco has filed for a series of postponements. County attorney Robert Orellana said the county was willing to negotiate, but that the company chose to go directly to court to appeal the new mandate.
The pollution control district has issued two notices of violation in the last several years. Halaco gets the most complaint calls of any facility in the county, officials said.
The Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board is engaged in a skirmish with Halaco over contested claims that the company is leaking waste water, including ammonia and high levels of metals, into the water.
New Development Hindered, City Says
Halaco says the site is protected by a natural clay liner underneath its grounds that keeps metals from leaching into the storm drain, but the water control board called that assessment “speculative and unconfirmed” in a report last year.
And Halaco is petitioning the court to delay hearing the ChannelKeeper case until after its regulatory affairs are in order.
In the meantime, city officials say they are stuck with the facility, even as development has sprouted nearby and the city ponders an ambitious plan to fix the blighted area surrounding the plant.
A developer is considering putting homes on about 1,400 acres above Hueneme Road, and leaving hundreds of acres designated as wetlands and open as public space.
Halaco, among other stumbling blocks, may make that idea impossible.
“It hinders development out there,” said Curtis Cannon, the city’s redevelopment director. “It changes the whole project considerably.”
Even after a report nearly two years ago by the Urban Land Institute recommended that the city buy the plant and send it somewhere else, Oxnard city officials say there is little chance that will happen, and that they haven’t even considered the possibility.
“The first reason is money. And the second reason is money,” said Steve Kinney, president of the Greater Oxnard Economic Development Corp.
The only public nuisance Halaco has acknowledged is an occasional metallic smell that whips through nearby neighborhoods when there is an “unusual wind pattern.” Fine said that if the wind is blowing toward homes, the site is voluntarily shut down.
For Drew Bohan from ChannelKeeper, that isn’t nearly enough.
He says the site should at the very least cover the slag heap to keep children out.
“That thing is a disaster waiting to happen. If a kid fell in there, he would be unlikely to get out. It’s a thick, nasty pudding,” he said.
Halaco’s operators, meanwhile, say they just want to run their business. The recycling that occurs there, they say, is not a bane to the environment. Quite the opposite, it’s a service, they say.
“Some of the people who are agitated about it being there are the same people who say it’s an essential industry,” Fine said. “If they understand why it is where it is, they might have to say, ‘Maybe, this is the best location for it.’ ”
