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Following the Ozark Mountain Solid Waste District’s public meeting at NABORS landfill last week, the Friends of the North Fork and White River have released an official statement questioning and rebutting some of claims made by officials.
It was announced that the sale of NABORS landfill, and the likelihood of it taking on more trash, was a “done deal” at Friday’s meeting.
Representatives from Lakeshore Recycling Systems, the Illinois based company seeking to purchase the landfill, claimed that the landfill could begin taking on trash as soon as six months following the final sale signature from Pulaski Circuit Court Judge Tim Fox.
The Friends of the North Fork and White River was founded in 2002 and is an Arkansas non-profit 501(c)(3). They are “dedicated to clean, healthy water in these rivers, and to the protection of this watershed (Middle Section of the White River) for future generations”.
“The Ozark Mountain Solid Waste District should take heed when a county Quorum Court and a City Council of the county seat clearly and unanimously express their opposition to a landfill opening or reopening in their county,” stated the official response. “Their resolutions opposing the reopening were undertaken for good reasons and should be respected even if not required by district rules.”
The first claim that is disputed by the Friends of the White River, covers remarks made by Rusty Janssen, regional SVP for LRS.
During a discussion which took place on top of one of the covered mountains of garbage at NABORS landfill, Janssen hand waved concerns over toxic chemicals leaking into the ground water, stating that the water was “clean,” with only one well testing for higher than normal levels of toxic chemicals.
“There’s a small amount of contamination in one little monitoring well, but everything else is clear and we’ve got a plan to improve it,” Janssen said at the meeting.
Yet the state’s most recent survey of the groundwater at NABORS landfill states otherwise, noting that several hazardous chemicals are testing at high levels at multiple wells around the site. The claim baffled members of the Friends of the White River who were in attendance.
“At the time of closure, the Arkansas Division of Environmental Quality led the public to believe that the NABORS landfill was to be permanently closed because of hazardous chemicals leaking into the groundwater and surface water,” stated the Friends of the White River in their response to Janssen’s claim. “Around fourteen million dollars has been spent by ADEQ to remediate the problem. The October 2022 Harbor Engineering report lists all of the hazardous chemicals found in groundwater sampling around the NABORS landfill site. We fail to understand how an LRS representative can characterize the sampled water as ‘clean.’”
Another perplexing claim from Friday’s meeting came from OMSWD Board Director Fred Woehl, who claimed that landfill was the problem of Baxter County, and not the other counties that compose the district.
“Baxter and Carrol County is the reason this landfill is here,” Woehl said. “Marion County had nothing to do with it. Boone County had nothing to do with it. Searcy County had nothing to do with it. It was Baxter and Carroll County that got this landfill going. That’s the problem they have dumped on the whole district is that area right there. And then when it turned upside down, they tried to get out of it.”
Yet that claim is not historically accurate. The Northwest Arkansas Solid Waste District, which would later rename itself to the OMSWD, sought to purchase the landfill in 2005. Every county, and its respective representatives, voted to approve the purchase so that the district could raise funds off of operating the landfill.
The purchase of the landfill turned out to be a mistake by OMSWD, which quickly found itself in a financial deficit, leading to a bankruptcy suit that would ultimately shut down the landfill after ADEQ stepped in and claimed that landfill should be shuttered over health and safety concerns.
“It was the Northwest Arkansas Solid Waste District (later OMSWD) with the help of the Northwest Arkansas Economic Development District that sought the purchase of RLH Landfill in 2005 and, in the process, created NABORS (North Arkansas Board of Regional Sanitation). All counties in the district approved the purchase. We fail to understand why Mr. Woehl characterizes this as Baxter County’s landfill problem,” stated the Friends of the White River in their public rebuttal to Woehl.
The Friends of the White River are also disputing Woehl’s claim that the district has no say in the sale of the landfill. That claim, which was made during the opening of the meeting, is at complete odds with what the district’s own lawyer said earlier in their January meeting.
John Verkamp, the districts lawyer who was involved in both lawsuits that eventually shut down the landfill, stated that he had drafted several outs into the sale agreement should the board, or LRS, wish to walk away from the deal.
It should be noted that the board’s previous board director, David Nixon, signed the sales agreement in December, with no public remark or sign off from Judge Fox.
“A Pulaski County judge ordered the land to be sold to get what little money that could be obtained from the OMSWD property connected with the OMSWD bankruptcy. He did not say that the property must be sold to LRS. There are other buyers that will pay the same amount of money for the land and will not open a landfill. ADEQ will continue to monitor and remediate the landfill,” stated the Friends of the White River.
The final claim the Friends of the White River wished to publicly dispute in their official response to Friday’s meeting, was the claim that NABORS landfill does not rest on karst topography.
The claim, which drew outrage from several members of the public, was made by several representatives of LRS, who said that none of the drill samples showed features of karst topography. That claim is at odds with ADEQ, who often cites the landfill’s topography in their reports, and nearly 50 years’ worth of public reporting on the landfill.
“Many documents can be found in the ADEQ public database that make reference to karst features in the limestone underlying the landfill site. These were written by hydrologeologists, engineers and ADEQ staff scientists following their own investigations. The ADEQ has stated that the landfill site is unstable, having poor foundation conditions because of karst features. We fail to understand why an LRS representative would state that the NABORS landfill was not built atop karst topography.”
