Sludge Ban Is Primed to Pass

It’s a typical day at Green Acres: Rippling fields of wheat await harvest, a cat scampers after field mice and workers unload 750 tons of processed human waste from Los Angeles, fertilizing a quiet revolt in rural Kern County.

Fearful of deteriorating air and water quality, many folks in the New Jersey-size county have about had it with the daily parade of trucks dumping sewage sludge onto their fields. On top of that, they can’t stand what is viewed as Los Angeles’ imperial attitude, such as recent reports that social workers in Los Angeles County had given homeless people one-way bus tickets to Bakersfield, the largest city in Kern County.

In fact, many residents are simply sick of Los Angeles.

“People genuinely have the feeling that we’ve got a bully next door, flinging garbage over his fence into our yard,” said Paul Giboney, an agronomist for a large family farm and a leading supporter of a proposed sludge ban. “We’re not treated with appropriate respect.”

Come June 6, the relationship between dumper and dumpee could well change. For the first time, Kern County voters will be asked to ban the use of sewage sludge on farm fields -- a watershed decision for a place that takes in one-third of the state’s sludge.

Los Angeles officials contend that Kern County residents are being manipulated by a state senator who’s pressing the initiative for political gain. Their sludge is perfectly safe, they say, casting themselves as victims of a campaign to cast the city as a sludge-spewing predator.

Even so, the measure could encourage similar actions in other parts of the sprawling San Joaquin Valley, said Carol Whiteside, director of the Great Valley Center, a research organization in Modesto.

“The valley is home to every one of the 11 prisons built since 1990,” she said. “We have waste-burners and tire-burners and proposals for even more garbage. At some point, there’s enough critical mass that people say: ‘No more. That’s not our future.’ ”

Passage of Measure E, the so-called Keep Kern Clean initiative, seems to be a sure bet -- so much so that it stalled plans by a Missouri company for a massive landfill that would bury millions of tons of Los Angeles garbage in the wind-swept Kern County desert. Earlier this month, backers pulled the plug on a November ballot proposition for the dump’s approval.

Even officials of Los Angeles -- just one of numerous coastal cities that trucks its sludge to farms throughout Kern County -- concede that defeat at the polls is a virtual certainty.

“There isn’t anyone in the county who wants us to stay,” said Joe Mundine, an assistant director of the Los Angeles Bureau of Sanitation. “There’s no doubt that this will pass.”

If it does, then Orange County, Los Angeles County, Oxnard and Ventura, among others, will also be scrambling to find new places to dump sludge.

In the meantime, Kern County can expect a lawsuit challenging its right to ban a widespread practice that has not been definitively linked to any health problems, Mundine said.

Los Angeles owns Green Acres and believes a sludge ban would illegally restrict the use of its property. “There’s a huge investment here and the city wants to protect it,” Mundine added.

Bracing for a loss in June, the city has lined up farmers in Arizona willing to use its sludge. The cost to taxpayers would increase from $7 million a year to as much as $21 million a year. No immediate fee increase is expected, and officials say they don’t know how much a potential hike would be.

Orange County already trucks some sludge to Arizona and probably will send more if the measure passes, said Layne Baroldi, an official with the sanitation district that serves about 80% of the county’s residents. “It could cost us $700,000 a year, but the real story is the precedent it could set,” Baroldi said. “Who’s to say that other challenges like it won’t metastasize from county to county?”

The Orange County district spreads nearly a third of its sludge on the privately owned Honeybucket Farm, which recently was named “Agribusiness of the Year” by the chamber of commerce in the Kern County town of Delano.

Off Interstate 5 in the wide-open spaces 15 miles southwest of Bakersfield, Green Acres is the final resting place for virtually all of Los Angeles’ treated sewage. The city, which has used the site since 1994, bought it for $9.3 million in 2000. It also spent about $40 million upgrading its treatment system to produce what is known as “Class A” sludge.

The farm, at 4,688 acres, is roughly the size of Griffith Park. More than two dozen tanker trucks roll through its gates every day, dumping vast loads of dark muck, which are tilled into the soil within hours. The farm’s wheat, alfalfa and corn are sold to nearby dairies as feed.

Diane Gilbert, a spokeswoman for the city sanitation bureau, likens the odor to the mild aroma of potting soil. Any bad smells the locals complain about, she said, must come from other farms. On one recent morning, the smell at Green Acres was a barely perceptible musty presence.

The farm pours $8 million a year in wages and purchases into the local economy, Gilbert said. The so-called biosolids have turned marginal farmland into a productive parcel, complete with hundreds of sheep grazing in the winter.

After more than two weeks of elaborate cleansing at the Hyperion Treatment Plant in Playa del Rey, the sludge is about as benign as sludge can get, officials said. “If we put it in bags,” Gilbert said, “we could sell it at the supermarket.”

Alan B. Rubin, the Environmental Protection Agency’s top scientist on sewage sludge until he retired last year, vigorously defends spreading it on fields -- a practice that he said has proved safe over decades.

“Without a doubt, this is the most evaluated material at the EPA,” said Rubin, now a consultant for Responsible Biosolids Management, the Santa Barbara firm that operates Green Acres for Los Angeles.

Advanced treatment eliminates many toxins, and traces of others remain locked in the topsoil, thanks to “the incredible binding capacity of biosolids,” Rubin said.

Other scientists are more skeptical. Ellen Z. Harrison, director of Cornell University’s Waste Management Institute, believes the EPA’s safety standards are far too lenient when it comes to sludge.

Health effects haven’t been definitively shown, she acknowledged, but few scientists have seriously examined reports of sludge-related illnesses. “The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence,” she said, citing a scientific maxim.

In Kern County and elsewhere, critics contend that the industrial chemicals and medical wastes in sludge may combine over time to create contaminants undreamed of by the EPA. With Green Acres situated over part of the Kern County Water Bank, a massive underground water-storage project, some residents contend that no matter what sludge does for alfalfa, it carries an unacceptable risk for humans.

Larry Pearson, a councilman from Wasco, about 20 miles north of Green Acres, likens a stretch of Interstate 5 to “driving through a toilet bowl.”

“I raised the sludge issue at a meeting of the California League of Cities, and I was about run out of the room,” he said. “They kept telling me this stuff is so wonderful, it’s really good for you. I told them that if it’s that good, to put it on their own farms and flowerbeds.”

Los Angeles officials say that test wells around the property are rigorously monitored by four independent agencies. Sludge won’t seep into the groundwater, they say, because layers of impermeable hardpan lie beneath the topsoil.

“There’s no problem with the groundwater,” said the sanitation bureau’s Gilbert, adding that Los Angeles itself owns much of the reserve in the Kern County Water Bank.

Los Angeles officials contend that the anti-sludge campaign has been whipped up by state Sen. Dean Florez (D-Shafter), an outspoken Harvard MBA and former investment banker who grew up in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley. Florez scoffs at the criticism. “A lot of us may have been born at night but we weren’t born last night,” he said.

Florez, who futilely tried to get a sludge ban through the Legislature, led the initiative drive. “We’ve become, in essence, the dump capital,” he said. “It’s hard to clean yourself up, if trucks keep dumping someone else’s problem in your yard.”

Gilbert bristles at such analogies, pointing out that Kern County dumps thousands of tons of toxic waste at facilities in Los Angeles County. Besides, she said, huge tracts of farmland in Los Angeles County simply aren’t affordable.

Still, winning the hearts and minds of Kern County will be difficult. The petition that put the sludge ban on the ballot drew 10,000 signatures more than needed.

RBM, the company that runs Green Acres, may place a few newspaper ads -- if not to win, then to “educate people that this hocus-pocus political program is out of touch with reality,” company President Jon Coffin said.

The initiative’s website features a two-story outhouse labeled “L.A. County” on top and “Kern County” on the bottom.

That idea resonated with half a dozen pals lingering over doughnuts at a bakery in Shafter, 25 miles north of Green Acres.

“Maybe I’m just suspicious by nature,” said retired accountant Rex Tudor, “but when they want to give me something like sewage sludge, I can’t believe it’ll be good for me.”