Let’s share our lesson

Let’s share our lesson

Rappahannock's supervisors have learned a painful lesson in trying to function under the state’s new regulations for handling applications for sanitary landfills: the regulations are backwards.

Under the regulations* time frame, a local government that wants to hear from the people must do so without having answers to the questions that the people can be expected to ask. And let’s face it, consideration of a site, any site, for a dump means war with at least the neighboring landowners. It’s a war worth fighting if the locality wins a means to dispose of its solid waste, but under the state’s new regulations, that war may be waged unnecessarily over a piece of property totally inadequate for solid waste disposal.

As it now stands, when the state’s Department of Solid Waste Management receives an application for a sanitary landfill, the local government in whose jurisdiction the site lies must be notified immediately. We have no quarrel with that requirement. It prevents a repeat of thd sorry chain of events that resulted in approval for a landfill without local government’s knowledge, much less concurrence.

Once that notification is received, the local government has five days to decide whether to hold a public hearing. The hearing is not required, and should it be declined, the state deems that the load government has no objections to the proposed landfill. We’d rather see the hearing be mandatory and we’d rather see the state bound by the local government’s decision instead of just advised by it. But we can accept this section of the regulations as they’re now written. « Our quarrel — and that of the Bdard of Supervisors — comes in the timeallowed for scheduling that hearing. It must be held within 30 days, insufficent time for completion of the soil analyses which determine whether the property can be used for a landfill.

We understand that, under the state’s regulations, the Board of Supervisors is supposed to judge the proposed dump site only from a land use and zoning standpoint. That’s the way it’s supposed to go, in theory. But try telling that to a hearing room of angry and worried landowners who want to know if the landfill will pose a threat to their water supply.

The state asks for theory; the people want facts.

Rappahannock’s supervisors know this. They held their public hearing on the Lee Patrnership’s application for a landfill on the Fodderstack Road just beyond Washington’s town limits. “The wounds inflicted over the Fodderstack site won’t heal for years,” as one supervisor said. And it was all for nothing, as engineers found the tract - after soil testing and analysis - “unusable.”

Rappahannock’s supervisors may be the only local governing body in the state that knows the problem built in to the new permitting regulations since they are the first to seek approval for a landfill under those regulations.

Knowing the problem, the supervisors should seek to eliminate it.

They should ask their representatives in Virginia’s General Assembly to introduce legislation which would at least change the time frame to allow 90 days for the public hearing: time to get soil tests done; time to get answers to the questions that the people aren’t supposed to ask at this hearing, but do; time to learn whether it will be a landfill war worth fighting.

Changes made to burning law