FortBendNow.com

After a presentation Monday night by opponents of Allied Waste’s plans to expand Blue Ridge Landfill, Pearland City Council voted to oppose those plans as well.

One council member abstained because the law firm she worked for had represented Allied Waste in the past, and the rest of those present voted to adopt a resolution opposing the landfill expansion.

Owned by Allied subsidiary Blue Ridge Landfill TX L.P., the facility, at 2200 F.M. 521, is about a mile north of Fresno in Fort Bend County, but also just across 521 from Pearland.

Allied has obtained a “draft permit” that, if made permanent, would allow the company to expand the landfill from its current 302-acre “waste footprint,” where refuse is permitted to be piled up to 58 feet high, to 784 acres, with the right to pile refuse up to 170 feet high. Texas Commission on Environmental Quality commissioners will have to vote in favor of the project before any work can proceed.

Richard Morrison, an environmental attorney representing Coalition Against Blue Ridge Landfill Expansion, spoke to the council before the vote. He said he learned that the city eventually intends to treat water from Mustang Bayou and use it for drinking water.

No portion of the proposed footprint of the expanded landfill lies within the bayou’s floodplain, but the southwest corner of the property is within its 100-year floodplain, Morrison said in written comments submitted to the TCEQ during a hearing last Thursday.

Morrison has raised the possibility of barium leaking from the landfill, based on an incident Allied acknowledges in which a “statistically significant” increase in barium was discovered at one monitoring well at the existing landfill, in November 2005. Allied officials say they are convinced that the discovery was a natural occurrence.

Allied officials did not return a call for comment for this article.

Morrison said the TCEQ likely will respond by January or February to comments entered into the record at last week’s public hearing. He said he’ll then request what’s called a contested-case hearing which, if granted by the state agency, could take up to a year to complete.

A contested-case hearing would give opponents an opportunity to present their case and question the application, in this case, Allied. Such a hearing is seen by Morrison and others familiar with the permitting process as the only chance a citizens’ opposition group has to head off the expansion.

“These things are really so stacked against the citizens…It’s been getting more and more difficult to get one,” Morrison said of contested-case hearings. But the task may be easier, he added, “now that we have Pearland on our side.”

Fort Bend County and Missouri City will not oppose the expansion, Morrison believes, because they signed an agreement with Allied several years ago which states such a project won’t be opposed as long as it is operated within certain limits. One of those is that the height not exceed 170 feet.

About 175 people opposed to the expansion attended last week’s hearing. Several residents of Shadow Creek Ranch – a development in Pearland that’s close to the landfill – expressed fear their water would be unsafe and their property values would plummet if the expansion is approved.

Allied officials – one of whom lives in Shadow Creek Ranch – expressed confidence in the monitoring systems that would be in place, and maintain the operation will be safe and environmentally sound.