TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Tampa officials: Testing, cleaning up former landfills too costly

Staff file photo (2003)

The DEP has identified several sites as priorities, including a site near Pizzo Elementary – where tests found high levels of methane and other contaminants.

ADVERTISEMENT

By CHRISTIAN M. WADE | The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 12, 2009

Updated: 10/12/2009 03:25 pm

TAMPA - Faced with the prospect of spending hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up former landfills, Tampa officials want state lawmakers to lessen the financial impact.

The city's legal department is seeking support from the Florida League of Cities to push for legislation to limit the fiscal impact of a 4-year-old state regulation aimed at forcing local governments to investigate and clean up sites formerly occupied by landfills.

Tampa officials say the impact of the mandate, which would require the city to test and clean up as many as two dozen former landfills, will devastate the city's finances.

To date, no bill has been drafted and the city hasn't approached state lawmakers with a request to sponsor legislation. City officials have declined to discuss the landfill issue.

League officials said apprehension about the impact of the DEP mandate is spreading among municipalities across the state, most of which are struggling financially.

"It's definitely an issue we're concerned about," said C. Scott Dudley, the league's senior legislative advocate. "For cities, the cost of cleaning up these sites will be substantial."

He said the league's legislative committee will discuss the city's request in November and decide whether to add it to their list of priorities for the 2010 legislative session.

The push for a legislative solution follows more than a year of negotiations between the city and state regulators, who want the city to accept responsibility for the old landfills.

There are nearly 50 now-dormant landfills scattered across Tampa. Many of the sites were redeveloped as shopping plazas, houses, apartment complexes, playgrounds, parks and public schools. Others remain vacant parcels of contaminated land.

The DEP has identified several of those sites as priorities, including three near public schools – Pizzo Elementary, Roland Park Middle School and Young Middle Magnet School – where tests had found high levels of methane and other contaminants.

State regulators want the city to focus on testing and remediation of those and 18 other former landfills located on city owned properties; the remainder of the sites, which are privately owned, will be dealt with in the future. They said the city needs to begin testing and cleaning up those sites or it will face fines for noncompliance with the regulations.

"We want to start seeing some progress," said DEP spokeswoman Pamala Vazquez. "It is essential that we make sure there's no health risk to the public from contamination."

Tampa pays an environmental consulting firm about $200,000 a year to monitor several of the sites and city officials argue that there's no known health risk from the landfills.

DEP officials said available records of Tampa's former landfills, some of which date back to the 1940s, suggest that there are possible health risks lying beneath the surface.

Tests of the old dump sites by environmental consultants through the years have found higher-than-acceptable levels of methane, arsenic, cyanide and other toxic chemicals.

Most groundwater and soil samples were taken decades ago, and the DEP wants the city to enter into a long-term agreement with state regulators requiring them to conduct more extensive testing of the sites to figure out whether the waste should be removed.

In correspondence with DEP officials, city officials say they intend to comply with the regulations – even as they work behind the scenes to lessen the impact – but that an agreement would have to take into consideration the city's tough financial situation.

"Tampa, like all governmental jurisdictions, has limited resources," City Attorney Chip Fletcher wrote in a letter to Larry Morgan, DEP's general counsel. "The agreement will need to provide for a reasonable schedule and a funding limitation which would provide a ceiling for the amount of money that would be spent by the city on a yearly basis."

DEP and city officials are expected to meet to discuss the proposed settlement.

There have been no known cases of people who live near the old dump sites getting sick and no reports of exploding methane pockets where the gas has been detected.

But the potential for such problems have been documented in other sites across the country, and state regulators are taking a fresh look at risks posed by old landfills.

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.

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

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT