Rumer has it that where we live, (Bakersfield is at the "bottom" of) the San Juaquin Valley, grows an astounding 90% of the worlds food. From the Sacramento area's rice fields to the Fresno areas fruits and nuts to the carrots and everything else in Kern County and surrounding areas this valley is a huge producer of the worlds food supply.
Bakersfield is also home to oil plants a many, propane and other fuels. Consider the name, for instance Oildale. As in the name, "oil" depicts the oilfields which were where the residents of this what was then a suberb of the city of Kern-Bakersfield, the men and women worked who lived there- the Oil Fields! Even though now only a line on a map divides the towns their origin remains the same, built on agriculture and oil.
OK so here we are smack dab in the prospering epicentre of farming and fossil fuel production, we have a broken dam (at Lake Isabella) and are responsible for- What! Local toxic waste dumps all over the place. Seems this has been going on for quite some time and now the word is out
This Place Is Toxic!
Check out the article I read in today's Bakersfield Californian, titled Public Pays For Tocic Trails.
Print Story 
E-mail Story Public pays for toxic trails
BY SARAH RUBY AND JAMES BURGER, Californian staff writers
e-mail: sruby@bakersfield.com
e-mail: jburger@bakersfield.com | Saturday, Jun 24 2006 10:15 PM
Last Updated: Saturday, Jun 24 2006 10:48 PM
For decades, companies with questionable ethics made Kern County their home and piled up massive mounds of contaminated earth, toxic chemicals, oilfield sludges and heavy metals.
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And in some cases, the office paid by tax dollars to stop polluters -- Kern's Environmental Health Services Department -- stood by and let it happen.
One company, Resource Renewal Technology Inc., made a business of dumping oily dirt, discarded concrete, pools of sludge and other lucrative junk for more than a decade.
By 2002, when Kern County supervisors shut the company down, the waste cocktail near Maricopa had swelled with enough material to spread, one yard thick, across more than 30 football fields.
Other waste piles around Kern have similar histories.
* In 2005, neighbors discovered a vast moonscape of caustic ash at a sludge farm operated by USA Transport Inc. near Wasco. Their complaints triggered a state investigation, which later led the Kern Environmental Health Services Department to revoke the farm's permit. It is unknown how long the piles had been sitting there.
* Another company, Environmental Protection Corporation, poured toxic waste into open pits half a mile from the Kern River in the 1970s and 1980s. Water under the site is still saturated with toxic chemicals and heavy metals. The Kern department could have jumped in if it felt the site was an immediate threat, but the company was primarily regulated by the state, which shut it down in 1986.
* Each day thousands of Bakersfield commuters pass a huge toxic pile left by Gibson Environmental Inc. off Rosedale Highway. The pile might still be adorned with tanks full of hazardous waste if liquids hadn't leaked, prompting the state to launch an emergency cleanup in 1999 and 2000. The Kern department worked on the case, but the state took the lead.
These dump sites and the county's lackadaisical handling of them have helped seal Kern's reputation as a waste dumper's dream come true.
When the county or state does come to the rescue, dumpers often duck into bankruptcy, leaving the burden of cleanup on the public's shoulders.
As a result, most of Kern's abandoned waste sites sit untouched until regulators track down where the junk came from and force those companies to take action.
For example, Gibson Environmental's former customers paid some $8 million to remove immediate threats to the Kern River. Non-emergency cleanup was left for another day, and a contaminated pile still sits near Rosedale Highway.
So why weren't these and other polluters stopped before piles became mountains?
The reasons can be traced, at least in part, to the enforcement philosophy of Environmental Health Chief Steve McCalley, who retired March 31 after 17 years with the department. He took a gentle line with businesses -- a reflection of a community that doesn't want public employees "working here with a clipboard and an attitude," he said, paraphrasing former county supervisor Ben Austin.
"Could we be more forceful? Yes," he said in an interview before leaving the job. "Is that something that's acceptable to the community? Perhaps not."
In his view, the economic benefits of a friendly regulatory climate outweigh the damage caused by a few polluters unwilling to play fair.
"It's a balancing act," he said. "Businesses employ the citizens of this community. We have an obligation to collaborate for the good of the community."
Laws no help
Weak state laws also contribute to Kern's dumping problem, especially when companies insist they are not waste handlers but "recyclers," exempting them from solid waste laws. Most of Kern's enduring dump sites were run by people who claimed to recycle waste into a usable product, and local officials were slow to reclassify them as polluters.
Even today, county officials take most companies at their word for what they're doing. A recent example: the vast and possibly hazardous piles of ash allowed to gather at Oxnard's sludge farm near Wasco. The county put a list of conditions on the farm's permit, but regulators seldom check if those rules are being followed, said code enforcement and environmental health officials, who were answering to a dismayed board of supervisors April 4.
"We do very little follow up with conditional use permits," Chuck Lackey, who oversees the county's code enforcement division, said at the meeting.
Still, it's not all the fault of local agencies.
The nearby coastal county of Ventura doesn't have Kern's dumping problem, but if it did, officials there might not be able to deal with it any better, said William Stratton, manager of Ventura County's environmental health division. Unless a dump site is an active health hazard, environmental health officials' powers are limited, he said.
"They don't really have the tools that allow us to move very quickly and resolve these issues," Stratton said. "We have to go through a process and that process takes quite a bit of time."
A tough crowd
Some locals think Kern's environmental health department interprets its powers too narrowly. In some cases, the department spent years working with companies that had no intention of following the law. When their owners closed up and faded out of the public eye, the county was left with the mess -- piles full of heavy metals, refinery waste and contaminated soil. They're mostly in Kern's remote areas such as Maricopa and McKittrick, but some sit within a mile of the Kern River, a major source of drinking and agricultural water.
The environmental health department's enforcement record is "a mess," said state Sen. Dean Florez, D-Shafter. McCalley was "horrible" at protecting the environment if it meant crossing industry, he said.
"It's safe to say the only time the department acts is two reasons: bad press and crisis. That's it," he said.
Polluters have been known to get a pass here, said Deputy District Attorney John Mitchell, who handles environmental and consumer fraud cases.
"If you get caught you are going to get a notice to comply or a stern lecture from (the environmental health department)," he said. "One of my colleagues in another county calls (this style) the 'pretty-please' method of law enforcement."
In 2002, Mitchell sued the owners of Resource Renewal Technology, the company whose legacy sits in piles off Highway 166. That case settled a little more than a year ago. The company's owners paid $68,000 in fines. The site could cost $10 million to clean up.
Mitchell was hoping to force Resource Renewal Technology to clean up its mess, but "unfortunately, by the time that we got the case the cleanup costs were in the millions and the defendants didn't have the ability to pay that amount," he wrote in an e-mail.
Now the state Department of Toxic Substances Control is deciding if it should go after the company's former customers for cleanup costs. Early surface tests didn't show the site to be an imminent threat to health or groundwater, and while in-depth sampling would probably "get hazardous levels of something," the state is loathe to pay for a series of tests that can cost as much as $10,000 each, said Tom Kovac, who supervises hazardous cleanups for the state Department of Toxic Substances Control. Judges typically need proof of a substantial threat before they force a company's customers -- in this case, school districts, PG&E and uniform cleaning services, among others -- to pay for cleanup, he said.
Mitchell has nothing but praise for Kern's environmental health investigators, who have brought him "egregious, well-documented" cases in recent years. But unlike criminal cases, the decision of whether to refer a civil case for prosecution lies with the agency's leaders, he said, and Resource Renewal Technology is one that simmered for a decade before being sent to his office.
The attitude in Kern is changing, Mitchell said, but there are "people who still believe in the old school and don't want to do anything (about polluters)."
A case in point
Environmental health investigators were wary of pursuing Resource Renewal Technology for its bad environmental behavior, county records show. The department opened and closed an investigation of the company in the early 1990s, and shortly thereafter it let the company keep its status as a recycler instead of calling it a waste handler, exempting it from further red tape.
Resource Renewal Technology continued to pile up waste and enforcement once again came to a head in 2002. Brian Pitts, a lead investigator in the case, sent a note to his bosses asking for "reassurance" that they'd support him on a notice of violation against the company. He predicted a quick counterattack, which "doesn't bother me, but we have folks with weak knees around here," Pitts wrote.
Pitts refused to discuss the memo and why he wrote it.
Pitts would later take the case to the county planning commission and the board of supervisors, which rejected a venom-filled appeal by the company's owner, Calvin H. Cheek, Jr., to save his business.
"We have given this gentleman way, way, way too much latitude, and I don't know who is responsible for it," said Supervisor Barbara Patrick at a board meeting October 8, 2002. "This should have come to us months, if not years ago."
Supervisors revoked Cheek's permit, a move that closed the business but left the county with a pile of waste that will cost some $10 million to clean up.
"In the final analysis, the taxpayers are going to have to pay for this and I think that's a travesty," said Patrick at the meeting.
Patrick, who retires from office at the end of the year, said the county has learned lessons from its dealings with companies such as Resource Renewal Technology. It now requires businesses to put up money for unforeseen environmental cleanup costs.
"Once burned, twice shy," Patrick said. "You don't have to be hit in the head by a two-by-four more than once (to learn a lesson) -- or you shouldn't have to be."
The future
The future of the Environmental Health Services Department is now in the hands of Matt Constantine, who was selected by county administrators in February to take over for McCalley.
Constantine admits the department has made mistakes in how it's handled past cases. Given the information available today, he wishes the department had been more aggressive in shutting down Resource Renewal Technology, among other so-called recyclers.
"I think you have found some areas (where) perhaps we could have done better," he said. "I'm hopeful you'll see some of our responses recently reflect a change."
In the past five years, the department has gone after 18 landfills, trucking outfits and other companies for stockpiling solid waste or otherwise overstepping their permits. It's sent more than a dozen successful hazardous waste cases to the district attorney in that time, including one that yielded a $150,000 fine in 2005 for a trucking accident that released nitric acid from a tanker. In 2003, a department investigation led to a $1.2 million legal settlement from a company responsible for a release of hydrochloric acid into the air, and another investigation sent a man to jail in 2001 for releasing hazardous waste in a residential area.
As for his predecessor, Constantine said McCalley has "done an amazing job," and described him as a mentor. He admires McCalley's enthusiasm and accessibility, his ability to maximize limited resources and his "rational, reasonable approach."
"He's always here, he's always interested, he's always excited," said Constantine. "He's always accessible."
Under McCalley's direction, Constantine ran the county's troubled Animal Control Services Division until late 2004. The two men were responsible for a policy by which animal shelter workers routinely violated state law -- knowingly delivering lethal injections to thousands of animals before the end of a mandated 96-hour holding period.
Some county leaders hope Constantine will bring change to the environmental health department.
"The philosophy has always been try to get the cooperation of the offending party. Sometimes I think we go a little too far ... we give them too much time," said Supervisor Don Maben. "We've got a new guy coming on board, and maybe he can give us a little more strength in that direction."
Kern County is at a "crossroads," said Supervisor Michael Rubio.
"I think we are certainly lax compared to other counties," he said. "You have to start asking the question, how did we get to where we are today?"
Kern is a magnet for the hazardous waste industry, at least compared to its rural counterpart, Fresno County. Kern's environmental health department gave out 5,616 permits to hazardous waste handlers and generators in the past five years, and sent 15 investigations to the district attorney. Fresno gave out about half that many permits in that time, and didn't send any cases to the district attorney.
Kern's unique position as a solid and hazardous waste destination make comparison to other counties difficult, said Constantine. Kern's proximity to the Los Angeles area, the second most populated metro area in the country, creates "a rather unique problem we face here," he said.
Supervisor Ray Watson defends the department, saying it does a great job considering the number of facilities it regulates. The department has a careful approach, he said, but "when all the facts are in and there's a decision to be made, the decision will be made."
Supervisor Jon McQuiston agrees, and says the environmental health department's job is to work with businesses and help them comply with the law.
"We can either be a coach or an umpire," he said. "If all we are is scorekeeping and penalties, I think we're missing the point."
A roster of cases 1. U.S.A Transport Inc. 1998 The county let the company keep a year’s supply of caustic ash on the city of Oxnard’s sludge farm near Wasco. The ash, a refinery waste, was meant to kill pathogens in sewage sludge before the company spread it on cropland. 2001-2003 The county environmental health department cited the sludge operation for multiple violations. 2005 The piles of ash had swelled to more than 100,000 tons, roughly a six-year supply. Supervisor Ray Watson voiced concerns and the state Department of Toxic Substances Control began to investigate. January 2006 The state Department of Toxic Substances Control declared the ash a hazardous waste capable of causing pneumonia and chemical burns to the eyes, nose and throat. February 2005 The county environmental health department revoked the company’s permit. April 2005-Today County supervisors fined Oxnard and U.S.A. Transport $25,000 each. Oxnard cleared the site. State toxics officials are overseeing new tests of the ash because Oxnard and BP West Coast Products LLC insist it’s not hazardous waste.
2. Gibson Environmental Inc. 1978 The company opened a facility to treat and recycle waste oil and contaminated soil into road products. 1988 The state gave it a hazardous waste permit. 1994 The company filed for bankruptcy. 1995 Its operators abandoned the site, including tanks holding 850,000 gallons of liquids laced with lead, PCB, benzene and other toxics, and an 80,000-ton pile of contaminated soil and sludge. Even the tank meant to contain fire-control liquid was filled with toxic, flammable materials. 1996 & 1998 The state Department of Toxic Substances Control denied the company’s petition for permits. The county environmental health department was involved, but primary regulatory responsibility fell to the state. 1999 - 2001 Gibson’s customers were forced to clean up the site’s most hazardous junk. The solid pile still sits near the Kern River off Rosedale Highway, and no one knows if it’s contaminating groundwater. Company officials later spent time in jail.
3. Pacific Southwest Farms Inc. 1996 Southern California-based Barend “Barry” Meijer bypassed waste regulations by declaring his company a worm farm — an agricultural operation — instead of a waste handler. The worms would feed on yard clippings and other household “green waste” from Orange County, and the resulting compost would nourish planted crops. 1997 or 1998 Meijer abandoned the site, leaving plastic prescription bottles, syringes and asthma inhalers in tidy piles invisible from the road. All green waste includes some trash, but Meijer let that trash sit in 40 knee-high rows. 2002 & 2004 The county environmental health department issued abatement orders against the company, threatening fines and further action. Meijer ignored them. 2005 One of Meijer’s customers, Rainbow Disposal Company Inc. of Huntington Beach, tracked him down. Concerned about the company’s reputation, executives from Rainbow Disposal convinced Meijer to sign over the property so they could clean it up. The company spent some $500,000 on cleanup, not including the cost of paying Meijer’s water and property tax bills. 2006 The county environmental health department is going to make a final inspection and will likely send Rainbow Disposal a bill for staff time.
4. Resource Renewal Technology Inc. Early 1990s The company opened an asphalt plant near Maricopa without a permit, according to county documents. Its plan was to turn oil-field waste into road base. 1993 County zoning officials gave the company a temporary permit despite complaints from the waste industry that the so-called recycler was really a solid-waste dump. County environmental health officials closed an investigation of the company, saying its piles were non-hazardous. 1994 The county environmental health department officially recognized the company as a recycler, exempting it from solid waste rules. 2000-2001 In a whole year, the plant produced less than three days’ worth of asphalt, leaving it idle 98 percent of the time from July 2000 to the next July. 2002 Environmental health investigators took their case against the company to county supervisors, who shut it down. State and county attorneys sued the company’s owners. By the time it shut down, it had covered 16 acres with more than 200,000 cubic yards of waste. Tests revealed traces of gasoline, benzene, toluene, xylene, MTBE and various solvents. Its owners did not have money for cleanup, according to the Kern County district attorney’s office. 2006 State toxics officials are deciding what to do with a site that could cost $10 million to clean up.
5. Environmental Protection Corp. 1971 The company opened a dump site for oily waste near Hart Memorial Park northeast of Bakersfield. 1982 The state gave the company a permit to handle hazardous waste. 1986 The state revoked that permit and the facility shut down. Through the years it had absorbed 6.7 million barrels of liquids, sludge and solids without liners to prevent seepage into groundwater. The county environmental health department was kept in the loop, but the state took the lead on the case. 1994 The company agreed to liquidate its assets and let the state spend them on testing and cleanup. That money may not cover the costs of closing the site, and the state might have to make the company’s former customers pay up. 2006 Groundwater under the site near Hart Park and the Kern River is saturated with toxics, according to officials with the state Department of Toxic Substance Control. Contaminated water is kept out of Bakersfield’s drinking water by a quirk of natural geology and constant monitoring by state toxics officials.
6. EnviroCycle Inc. Late 1980s Oilman John Webb went into business turning oily sludge into pavement. He was originally permitted as a solid waste facility on 20 acres in McKittrick. 1995 The county environmental health department allowed EnviroCycle to surrender its solid waste permit because new rules classified it as a manufacturer, not a transfer station. 2003 With vague rules about how much pavement the plant must produce, Webb had let production slip and began stockpiling waste. The environmental health department inspected the site and found piles of soil stacked higher than 30 feet. It ran tests to see if the piles were hazardous, and the results indicated they weren’t. 2005 The environmental health department issued an abatement order against the company. Its representatives agreed to remove 100,000 tons, or half the stockpiled solid waste, in five years. 2006 Webb, who has been battling with the county over financial assurances, found a buyer for the property. A wall of waste still sits on the property.
7. CleanSoils Inc. 1986 The company opened an asphalt plant, using oily soil to make road base. It set up next to baseball fields at Panama Road near Cottonwood Road. 1993 The state Regional Water Quality Control Board inspected the site and found violations. The county environmental health department followed the case, but the state took the lead. 1995 The company opened a second facility in Bakersfield on White Lane and Cottonwood Road. It has since been cleaned up and shut down. By 1996 The company piled up unused oily soil and some hazardous waste at the Panama Road site, according to state documents. Some of the waste was taken to the company’s Bakersfield site. 1998 The company’s out-of-state owners told the county CleanSoils was out of business. 2006 The case is closed as far as the county is concerned, but some waste is still out there. 8. Los Angeles Waste Industries Inc. Sometime before 2003 The company got a contract to haul green waste from the city of Los Angeles to Kern, where it would be composted. Instead, it let piles of green waste rot away until the 5-acre plot was littered with trash 12 to 18 inches deep. 2003 The county environmental health department issued a series of abatement orders against the company, alleging it created a health hazard. Its owners ignored them. Late 2005 - 2006 An image-conscious garbage contractor, Waste Management, Inc., cleaned up the mess. The county environmental health department is billing Waste Management for staff time related to the cleanup. 9. Morton Recycling Inc. 1994 Morton Recycling set up an oily soil recycling business near Maricopa. 1997 The county environmental health department discovered Morton was taking industrial liquids — a lucrative business — and pouring them over piles of oil-contaminated soil. It alerted the Regional Water Quality Control Board, which ordered the company to stop all operations. Morton took 134,000 gallons of liquids and sludges in less than a year, according to state records. 1999 The site’s stockpile reached 76,000 cubic yards. Lead concentrations ranged from three to 20 times the hazardous limit. Lead and other toxics threatened groundwater, according to the water board report. 2006 State water officials are still working with the company’s owners to come up with a closure plan. The environmental health department is considering its own enforcement action.
Is Kern County lax on environmental enforcement? Your leaders weigh in.
“We can either be a coach or an umpire. If all we are is scorekeeping and penalties, I think we’re missing the point. The proper atmosphere is to encourage compliance.” Jon McQuiston, 1st District supervisor
“I would like to see stronger enforcement. The philosophy has always been try to get the cooperation of the offending party ... Sometimes I think we go a little too far in that direction.” Don Maben, 2nd District supervisor
“We are not lax on enforcement. I think there’s been a big change in environmental thinking. It has become a quality-of-life issue. Good health, good air, good water and safety, all of those need to be protected.” Barbara Patrick, 3rd District supervisor
“We at this point rely on a permitting process and on the honesty of the people in complying with the conditions of the permits. We don’t have enough people to police the activities on a continuous basis.” Ray Watson, 4th District supervisor
“I believe we’re now at a crossroads in Kern County where we make a decision to be the toxic gold of California or we choose to fight and protect our quality of life. I’m obviously of the opinion we should fight.” Michael Rubio, 5th District supervisor
“The county really has to figure out if it’s a friend of environment or a friend of industry. I just think there needs to be more of a watchdog mentality (at the environmental health department). We’re not pleased with the way it’s operating at all.” State Senator Dean Florez (D-Shafter)
“I believe that a quality of life includes a healthy economy. People benefit from jobs... (But) that practice of taking that dirt and piling it up is unacceptable.” State Senator Roy Ashburn (R-Bakersfield)
Assemblymember Nicole Parra (D-Hanford) did not wish to comment for the story. Assemblyman Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield): Did not return several calls and e-mails requesting comment since April.
Interesting documents from the county’s case against Resource Renewal Technology Inc., a company that called itself a recycler and dumped oily soil, concrete and other material for more than a decade before being shut down in 2002 Managing the media If not for the careful records of Resource Renewal Technology’s consultants, we would never know the lengths county officials apparently went to evade the press. According to memos dated January 1993, the planning department warned Resource Renewal Technology that a Channel 23 reporter had sniffed out the date and time of the company’s next site inspection. The consultant suggested the county secretly move the inspection “in order to avoid the press,” and the official, identified in the memo as Scott Denney, agreed to tell the reporter an inspection time hadn’t been set. Denney would then send the reporter to the consultant to find out the new time, and he would be conveniently out of the office. The reason for all this maneuvering? It’s that “this project was not controversial, but that the media was attempting to make it controversial,” the consultant wrote. Denney, now a supervising planner, doesn’t remember things the way they’re portrayed in the memos. You have to consider their source — a paid contractor who wants to look good to the man writing the checks, said both he and his boss, Planning Director Ted James. Property owners have the final say about who enters their property on an inspection, and it could be the consultant was embellishing that simple fact, they said. “We do not advise applicants to avoid the media,” James said good-naturedly. “They do that on their own, as you are well aware.” Alarm bells in the industry Waste-industry insiders complained about Resource Renewal Technology several times before the county closed its first case against the company in 1993. They objected to its recycler status, which let it avoid waste dumping rules despite its stockpile of unrecycled material. By calling itself one thing and doing another, Resource Renewal Technology enjoyed a “tremendous unfair competitive advantage,” wrote local consultant Randall Abbott. “This ongoing situation has caused a great deal of frustration ... within the properly regulated business community,” he said in another letter. Case closed? In the spring of 1993, shortly after the late county Supervisor Ken Peterson met with all parties in the case, McCalley closed the investigation of Resource Renewal Technology. “We regret any inconvenience that this may have caused,” he wrote. “However, you would agree that enforcement agencies must be vigorous in steps to prevent the public from environmental problems.” The county did not consider the company’s waste piles hazardous, McCalley wrote. McCalley sent the letter May 10, 1993. His department shut the company down in 2002. Who’s in charge? Documents show the environmental health department trying to work out the conditions under which Resource Renewal Technology would be exempt from solid waste rules. Drafts of the deal were circulated to the company’s owner, and the later the date on the draft, the fewer requirements it contains. For example, in an early draft, Environmental Health Director Steve McCalley specifically forbids the company’s owner, Calvin H. Cheek, Jr., from accepting non-soil waste such as sludge, drilling mud, fly ash, sand blasting residues, tank bottoms and other materials. This and other provisions are absent from a draft dated one month later. When asked about the exchange, McCalley said it was all a negotiation. “You throw it all out there and see what sticks,” he said. “Sometimes you put a very detailed laundry list together and work back from that point.” The “weak-knees” memo The case against Resource Renewal Technology had been closed once before, but Brian Pitts, a lead environmental health investigator, pressed his department to take the company to county supervisors in 2002. Before he did, he wrote a note to his boss asking for “reassurance from management that I will get support on this.” He predicts a counterattack from the company, probably “some type of nasty letter or court order. It doesn’t bother me, but we have folks with weak knees around here,” he wrote. Visit www.bakersfield.com to take a look at these documents for yourself.
Kern’s Environmental Health Services Department What it regulates: restaurants, the land application of sewage sludge, public pools, water wells, body art salons, hotels, prisons, solid waste and hazardous waste. Number of employees: 50 Number of employees dedicated to solid and hazardous waste enforcement: 17 Annual budget for this fiscal year, ending in June: $5.2 million Number of employees five years ago: 48 Operating budget five years ago: $3.9 million Operating budget 10 years ago: $4.2 million Number of inspections of restaurants, landfills, sludge farms, etc., it conducted in FY 2004-2005: 9,404 Minimum qualifications required for professional staff: Bachelor of Science degree and state certifications
Kern has “a long history” of putting business interests before public health, said Rosamond resident Jane Williams, a local activist who runs California Communities Against Toxics, a statewide environmental network started by her mother, Norma “Stormy” Williams. For years they enlisted state help with local environmental issues because of “a lack of political will in Kern County,” the younger Williams said. Whether it was fighting against cancer-causing dioxin pollution or shutting down an operation that set rail cars on fire to salvage the metal, Rosamond residents got nowhere with the county, Williams said. “We gave up on approaching the county back in the mid 80s,” Williams said. “They’re notorious.” If the community ever supported a hands-off approach to polluters, it doesn’t any longer, at least according to an unscientific sampling of residents, environmentalists, supermarket shoppers and Starbucks sippers: • “I don’t think it’s fair for any business to be loose with the law. What’s good for one guy should be good for another guy,” said Terrie Stoller, a Bakersfield resident and smart-growth advocate whose family owns Sunridge Nursery. • Agencies throughout the valley have “got it totally backwards. Allowing these bad apples to push the envelope places law-abiding businesses at a competitive disadvantage,” said Brent Newell, staff attorney with the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment. • “I’m conservative, but regardless of being business-friendly you have to protect the environment in this big smog bowl,” said Michelle Luckett, a local teacher whose family is in agriculture. • “We need to do everything we can to protect our environment. I think God created it and asked us to take care of it,” said Ed Rain, a local pastor. • “Business-friendly is reasonable friendly. It’s not, ‘Oh we’re going to bend over backwards so we can get new business in here.’ We have to take into consideration the future and the kids we’re dealing with — my kids,” said Philip Todd Niggle, a Bakersfield father of three shopping at Trader Joe’s. • If Kern stays firm it “will get the type of business clients that respect us as a people. By lowering our standards we encourage riff-raff to come in and take advantage of us — and bring their friends,” said Terrel French, a local physician.
Waste producers always own their waste; that is, if it’s mishandled by a third party, the source of the waste has to clean it up. Rather than risk running into a faux recycler, Aera Energy LLC handles its non-hazardous oilfield waste in-house. It sends hazardous waste to Clean Harbors hazardous waste facility near Buttonwillow, but it uses all its oily soil and concrete to pave hundreds of miles of roads in oilfields throughout Kern. “It’s better to undertake those activities ourselves so we know the work actually gets done,” said Ron Chambers, a lead environmental advisor at Aera. Aera is serious about environmental compliance, he said. If it does hire a contractor, it makes sure to “look for a track record.”
