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City Asked To Clean Up Landfill Site

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By CHRISTIAN M. WADE

cwade@tampatrib.com

Published: March 23, 2009

TAMPA - In the mid-1960s, Tampa was in the midst of a garbage crisis.

The city's municipal landfills were nearing capacity and a new incinerator was months from being built. Illegal dumps were cropping up across Hillsborough County.

It was about that time the men from the city showed up at Jose Suarez's doorstep.

Suarez, a first-generation immigrant from Spain, owned 40 undeveloped acres off Alvarez Road. The city was seeking land to bury its garbage until the incinerator was finished, and the men had come with a proposition from then-Mayor Nick Nuccio.

"They told my father that it was his civic duty to let the city bury trash on his property," said Evis Farmer, Suarez's daughter, who recalls the conversation.

Suarez told the men he would think about it, Farmer recalled. Shortly after, however, trucks from the city began burying tons of garbage on Suarez's land, she said, without his approval.

"My father never gave the city or county permission to use his property," she said.

Decades later, the Suarez family has been left with a worthless piece of contaminated land that neither the city nor the county wants to accept responsibility for cleaning up.

The Suarez property - referred to in city records as "Landfill #21," or the Alvarez Landfill, after the nearby road - is one of nine former dumps that the Florida Department of Environmental Protection wants Tampa to investigate and, if it finds contamination, clean it up.

Previous groundwater tests from the Alvarez Landfill revealed higher-than-normal levels of benzene, lead, thallium and nickel. The DEP suspects the site is contaminating the groundwater and wants more extensive testing conducted.

City officials, faced with the possibility of having to spend millions of dollars, are balking at the demands. They say the DEP's demands amount to an unfunded mandate that is being imposed on the city retroactively, making it a violation of the state constitution.

"Our position remains that we have done everything that is required under state law and that the DEP's new requirements don't apply to us," City Attorney Chip Fletcher said.

Fletcher and other city officials argue Tampa is not responsible for the old landfills, in part, because roughly 60 percent of the dump sites are on private property.

What's more, they argue, it was the property owners who had asked the city to bury trash on their lands for infill, a common practice in the days before environmental regulations.

Letter: Trash Would 'Benefit' Owners

Interviews with property owners and documents from the 1960s tell a different story. A Jan. 14, 1966, letter from Manuel Fernandez, superintendent of what was then known as the Tampa Sanitation Department, to Nuccio indicates it was the city that sought out property owners with the intent to use their property as temporary landfills.

In the letter, filed in the city's archives, Fernandez wrote that Tampa needed to find more vacant properties outside city limits to bury trash until a new incinerator was built.

"We are constantly looking and contacting property owners and making every effort humanly possible to locate new areas for landfills," he wrote. "The outlook is grim. This is a rather dangerous position for a city the size of Tampa to be in."

State and federal environmental regulations were virtually nonexistent back then and city officials didn't seem concerned about the long-term impact of the temporary landfills.

A copy of a letter sent to dozens of Hillsborough County property owners explained that allowing the city to dump trash on their land would "benefit them" by "filling in low or swampy areas, leaving the land with a higher and more desirable elevation in the end."

Farmer said her parents - both of whom have since passed away - never agreed to the city's request and there are no documents in city archives showing her father gave permission. Despite that, Hillsborough County issued the city a permit in 1965 to dump on the land.

The Suarez family never got a dime in compensation.

"They destroyed our land and gave us nothing in return," she said. "How is that fair?"

Farmer said she has tried numerous times over the years to sell the property, but once potential buyers find out what's beneath the surface they've backed out.

Hillsborough County had looked at buying the land a few years ago, but decided against it after learning it would cost more than $20 million to remove the buried waste.

In 2002, Farmer filed a lawsuit against the city seeking to force them to clean up the land or compensate her family. But a county judge ruled the statute of limitations had expired.

What's more, the property taxes on the parcel have increased dramatically, at one point reaching an assessed value of more than $2.4 million.

City Has Responsibility, Agency Says

There are nearly 50 old landfills in Tampa - more than 130 in unincorporated areas of Hillsborough - and many of them can be traced back to the mid-1960s garbage crisis.

Many of the sites were redeveloped as shopping plazas, houses, apartment complexes, playgrounds, parks and schools. Others remain vacant parcels of contaminated land.

DEP officials say regardless of who owns the land then or now, the responsibility for protecting the public lies with local governments.

"They're the ones that put it in the ground," said DEP spokeswoman Pamala Vazquez.

State regulators said they are concerned about potential environmental contamination.

Old landfills can hold many perils - migrating pockets of explosive methane gas, settling trash and debris that can cause homes and buildings to slide off foundations or sink, and chemicals from discarded paint that can taint wells and underground water supplies.

Because the use of liners for landfills wasn't required until recently, toxins buried long ago can spread, finding their way into nearby rivers, lakes and other bodies of water.

"We need to make sure there's no risk to the public from these sites," Vazquez said.

For Farmer, however, it's about righting a wrong.

"The trash belongs to the city," she said. "They need to take it away."

Reporter Christian M. Wade can be reached at (813) 259-7679.

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