by Bill McAllister
Denver Post Washington Bureau Chief
The Denver Post
WASHINGTON – Whatever she does as interior secretary, Gale Norton seems certain to be remembered for what she did Monday. That’s the day she declared a garbage dump in Fresno, Calif., a national historic landmark.
The ink on that pronouncement was hardly dry before her aides began signaling a retreat. It seems that the former Colorado attorney general and her aides didn’t realize that the Fresno Sanitary Landfill had another government designation. The Environmental Protection Agency had declared the landfill a Superfund site in 1989, a designation given lands filled
with the most hazardous of wastes.
That discovery, made by reporters moments after Norton’s announcement of the Bush administration’s first 15 historic sites, led to a series of less than flattering newspaper articles. “Something rotten on Bush’s first list of U.S. historic sites,” declared a
Los Angeles Daily News headline.
And there was lots of snickering among the environmental groups that have been among Norton’s harshest critics. “This is just what the Bush administration would like to do to the entire state of California,” Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope told the AP. “Trench it, compact it and shovel dirt over it.”
By midweek it was clear the dump’s designation was in doubt. The Fresno Bee took a tongue-in-cheek approach. “Cancel the parades. Reroute the tours. Shut down the T-shirt concessions. The dump has been dumped,” proclaimed the paper under the headline “Garbage in, garbage out for Fresno.”
The paper quoted Martin Melosi, a professor at the University of Houston and chief proponent of the landfill’s historic designation, as being stunned that officials had overlooked the Superfund designation. So did EPA officials who noted that the dump’s unsavory history is outlined on their website. Fresno Mayor Alan Autry was peeved at Interior’s “knee-jerk reaction,” but city officials said they didn’t plan to protest any withdrawal of the landmark status. After all, taxpayers have spent $38 million trying to clean up the site that Interior had hailed as “the oldest “true’ sanitary landfill in the United States.”
It was the first to use the so-called trench method of disposal and the first to use compaction, Interior had said in describing the dump’s worthiness for national historic landmark designation. What the mayor didn’t talk about is how California health officials in 1983 had discovered that methane gas and vinyl chloride had migrated from the landfill to surrounding areas, contaminating groundwater for wells in the area. Nor did he mention how the landfill is fenced and locked to keep the public out.
The fall guy in the whole affair appeared to be Dennis Galvin, deputy director of the National Park Service. He was the interim head of the agency when it recommended the landfill to Norton. On Monday night, he quickly fired off a memo to Norton saying he was
“unaware” that the landfill was a Superfund site and urged that the issue be reconsidered. Park Service spokeswoman Elaine Sevy held out hope that the agency would retain the historic designation. “Our history isn’t all wonderful and beautiful,” she said. Oh, yes, all that happened the same day that lawyers in the big Indian trust case against Norton and her department renewed their efforts to get the secretary cited for contempt of court. Their charge: Norton is part of a continuing cover-up and deception of the true status of 300,000 trust accounts held by Interior for American Indians.
All in all, it was a week that the secretary would probably just as soon have spent at home in Denver.
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