Riverside County Sued Over Plans for Huge Landfill

RIVERSIDE — Hoping to derail plans for the world’s largest garbage dump, opponents of the proposed Eagle Mountain Landfill on Thursday sued the Riverside County Board of Supervisors, alleging that their 3-2 approval of the project last month was based on a flawed environmental impact report.

The lawsuit alleges that the impact report failed, among other things, to assess the potential of toxins leaching into the ground water through fractured bedrock should the ground liner be torn in an earthquake or because of other stresses.

If a Riverside court agrees that the environmental report is inadequate, it would force the supervisors to reconsider their approval. And with a new county supervisor to be seated next month, landfill opponents hope that the board would reject the landfill.

The 4,700-acre garbage dump is proposed for a former Kaiser Steel iron mine--deep enough to accommodate 20,000 tons of Southern California garbage daily for 115 years. The site is 87 miles east of Palm Springs and 10 miles north of Interstate 10.

About 90% of the trash would be delivered to the landfill by trains--a strategy gaining currency among trash management officials who embrace the use of mega-dumps.

In Los Angeles on Thursday, county sanitation officials staged a demonstration of how 20-ton garbage containers can be loaded onto flatbed rail cars and shipped to a 3,000-acre landfill near East Carbon City, Utah, at that city’s invitation.

Another proposal by the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway Co. and Waste Management Inc., called Rail-Cycle, proposes to ship garbage to a 4,800-acre landfill 80 miles east of Barstow, near Amboy. The environmental impact report on that project was released Thursday for public review.

Although the Eagle Mountain project has received approval of Riverside County supervisors, the same environmental impact report was rejected last Friday by the state Integrated Waste Management Board as inadequate. Various other public agencies must still review it.

Thursday’s lawsuit repeats complaints by critics that the landfill would irreparably harm the desert environment, taint the water delivered by the open air California River Aqueduct, disrupt the quiet of the Joshua Tree National Monument less than two miles away and foul the air.

The attorney for the opponents, Joel Moskowitz, is a former toxic waste control director for former Gov. George Deukmejian. He said his biggest concern is the potential contamination of the area’s ground water.

“The only thing that separates the leachates from the ground water is a thin liner . . . that’s never been tested,” Moskowitz said. “Once toxic substances get in the ground water, you’ll never get it out and then there’s hell to pay.”

State Assemblyman Steve Clute (D-Riverside), one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said: “The blank check given to this trash train will shackle this county for the next century.” He characterized county supervisors, Browning Ferris Industries and Mining Reclamation Corp.--the private partners in the project--as “arrogant” for having “ignored the law.”

“These corporations have tried to cram sugarcoated platitudes down our throats and left out portions of the project to hide the environmental impacts,” Clute said.

Joining in the lawsuit were the National Parks and Conservation Assn., the Eagle Mountain Landfill Opposition Coalition, the city of Coachella and former Riverside County Superior Court Judge Richard Marsh, chairman of the Desert Protection Fund.

The lawsuit was shrugged off by Rick Daniels, president of the Mine Reclamation Corp. He said the company “is well positioned to work with Riverside County to withstand legal challenges.”

“We have always expected legal maneuvers from a small band of project opponents,” he said. “As disappointing as these tactics may be, they won’t keep this community from realizing the environmental and economic benefits from this project.”

Attorneys say a hearing on the lawsuit is expected within four months.