Kern can stop Southland's sludge invasion

It all started off innocently enough. A Northern California city had a sludge problem and was looking for the most cost-effective way of getting rid of it. Between 1958 and 1973, the city of Livermore touted the city's sewage sludge as a great fertilizer for gardens and landscapes, and offered it to residents for free.

Unbeknownst to residents who trusted city officials, the sludge is believed to have been contaminated by plutonium released from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory into the city's sewer system.

In a small town in Pennsylvania, Antoinette and Russell Pennock thought the farm next to their home was innocently spreading cow manure on nearby fields. Not until their son, Daniel, died in 1995 of a massive bacterial infection did they realize that the farmer was spreading sewage sludge. Danny, 17, died from an infection he got after walking on land thick with sludge.

And in 2002, the family of Shayne Conner, a New Hampshire man who died in 1995 after being exposed to sludge, received an undisclosed settlement from a wrongful death lawsuit filed against Synagro Technologies. Synagro is the nation's largest sludge company and the parent of the South Kern Industrial Center that plans to build a sewage sludge-composting plant seven miles east of Taft.

Officials at Synagro claim that they settled out of concern for the victim's family and point to a statement that the family issued absolving sewage sludge as the cause of Shayne's death. Synagro officials later acknowledged that the company helped draft the statement and the Conner family signed it as a condition of the settlement.

Major health and environmental catastrophes start off innocently. First they tell us: Don't worry. It's safe. The science of the day can't prove that it's harmful.

Then people start getting sick, so we come up with new "safety" regulations. And finally when folks start to die, we're told that alternatives to cleaning up the mess will only cause worse damage so we just have to live with it and there is nothing that we can do about it.

Sound familiar? After years of allowing sanitation departments in Los Angeles and Orange counties to yearly dump over 450,000 tons of sewage waste on local farmland, we're told that we can't do anything about it. Never mind that the sewage sludge is spread over land above valuable water reserves.

Never mind that all it takes is one incident, one illness, one infection or one case of contamination of our groundwater for the market for all our valley crops to plummet and a quarantine to be imposed on us. Just look at what one case of mad cow disease did to the cattle and dairy industries around the world.

But what's most troubling about this situation is that it's simply not just the waste generators and haulers who are saying that we can't stop it. Unbelievably, it's our own elected county supervisors the folks who have the power to determine land use.

Twelve counties in California ban or effectively block the land application of sewage sludge. Why them and not us? Our county has too often innocently welcomed outside polluters. Rather than asking tough questions, putting forward tough public protection rules and being true conservatives with our land, they liberally fall on the side of the polluters claiming that we can't do anything about it.

It's time that our elected county officials stop acting so innocently. And it's time that we stop the culture of helplessness. What can county officials do immediately?

**First of all, they can support my legislation (Senate Bill 926) to ban the importation of sewage sludge across county lines. The proposed law says that each county needs to take care of its own sewage sludge.

**Secondly they can pass an ordinance to simply ban the land application of sewage sludge. An opinion from the Legislature's legislative counsel says that it can be done.

**And lastly, they can re-evaluate the conditional-use permit for the massive Synagro sewage composting plant slated for construction next to Taft. Holding a more publicized and public meeting on the permit and the company's plans would be a good start.

Kern County has hung out the welcome mat to sludge peddlers for far too long. We've seen the deaths and the effects sludge is having in communities across our country. Simply saying that we can't stop it isn't good enough. If our supervisors are not ready to pull the welcome mat from the feet of the sludge peddlers, then they run the risk of having the mat pulled out from beneath their feet when the voters finally get their hands on the situation through the initiative process.