Hinkley residents sue over composting rule

Hinkley residents are suing the local agency that regulates air quality in hopes of forcing it to toughen a rule governing composting facilities.

The group HelpHinkley.org, represented pro bono by the Center for Race, Poverty, and the Environment, filed its suit against the Mojave Desert Air Quality Management District in the San Bernardino County Superior Court in Barstow Monday.

The complaint asks for a court order to rescind a rule passed by the MDAQMD on Oct. 27, governing the air quality impacts of composting facilities. The suit asks that the air district be required to perform an environmental review and do a new cost analysis of various pollution control requirements on composting facilities before the rule can be reinstated.

One of the measures that the air district examined, but ultimately did not include in the rule, would have required large composting facilities to be enclosed.

The HelpHinkley.org group has been engaged in a drawn-out battle with San Bernardino County and Nursery Products, LLC, over the environmental impacts of a proposed composting facility west of Hinkley. The open-air Nursery Products Hawes Composting Facility would mix waste products, including human waste, with green materials to create compost, handling about 400,000 tons of material a year.

Hinkley residents complained of potential air and water pollution from the composting facility. The HelpHinkley.org members had pushed for a composting rule that would require the Nursery Products facility, if constructed, to be enclosed.

However, MDAQMD did not require enclosure in the rule it passed on Oct. 27, after concluding that it would not be cost effective and that the level of fine particulate pollution in the area did not warrant such strict measures.

HelpHinkley.org chairman Norm Diaz said he did not think the air district’s cost analysis was accurate.

Attorney Ingrid Brostrom with the Center For Race, Poverty and the Environment said the air district also failed to do an adequate environmental review and included some measures in the rule adopted Oct. 27 that may actually increase odor and emissions rather than decreasing them.
Without stricter rules, more and more composting facilities might look to locate in the district, she said.

“The real substance of why this rule is so bad is, basically, it’s the most lax rule in the area, so when you have so much waste that needs to be composted, it’s going to go to the area with the least regulations,” Brostrom said.

Chris Seney, director of operations for Nursery Products, on the other hand, said that the existing rule is the strictest in the nation for an area that currently meets federal standards for fine particulate matter pollution. Seney said he was not concerned that the new lawsuit might halt the proposed facility in Hinkley.

MDAQMD spokeswoman Violette Roberts could not speak about the substance of the complaint, due to an air district policy against commenting on pending litigation. She said, however, that the district had always been aware that there was a possibility of litigation from either the proponents or opponents of the proposed composting facility in Hinkley.

“That’s why we had to make sure that when we were writing our rule, that we had researched all the potential issues and made sure we had dotted all our i’s and crossed our t’s,” she said.

Roberts noted that the air district, which is not a land use agency, has no authority to stop the Nursery Products facility, and without a rule in place, would have little enforcement authority over its operations.

Until the court rules on the suit, the rule passed on Oct. 27 will remain in place.

Contact the writer:
(760) 256-4123 or asewell@desertdispatch.com

Timeline:

• Feb. 2007: The San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors approves a conditional use permit for the proposed Nursery Products Hawes Composting Facility near Hinkley.

• March 2007: HelpHinkley.org and the Center for Biological Diversity sue San Bernardino County and Nursery Products, LLC, over the environmental impact of the composting facility.

• April 2008: The San Bernardino County Superior Court rules that the county must suspend the project until it can address two issues in the environmental impact report: examining the possibility of enclosing the facility and identifying a water source for it.

• Oct. 27, 2008: The MDAQMD passed a rule governing composting facilities. The rule does not require facilities to be enclosed.

• Dec. 8, 2008: HelpHinkley.org files a lawsuit against the MDAQMD in an attempt to make it rewrite the rule.