[StBernard] Lack of controls at St. Bernard transfer station complicate overbilling controversy with SDT Waste

[Westley Annis]

Lack of controls at St. Bernard transfer station complicate overbilling
controversy with SDT Waste
by Chris Kirkham, The Times-Picayune 
Friday November 28, 2008, 6:15 AM

After months of sharply rising garbage disposal bills, the St. Bernard
Parish Council and President Craig Taffaro are finding few firm answers as
they try to negotiate a cash settlement with garbage executive Sidney Torres
IV. 

The data provided by Torres' SDT Waste & Debris offer no definitive proof
that construction debris and other garbage from outside St. Bernard was
tacked onto the parish's disposal bill at the River Birch landfill, but
Torres this week acknowledged that was probably the case. 

He said there was no sound science in the way garbage was segregated at the
landfill among St. Bernard, New Orleans and his commercial accounts. Debris
and garbage from the pile was simply loaded onto large trailers at the
SDT-operated transfer station on Paris Road and hauled to River Birch. 

The parish instituted no controls over the transfer station until this
summer. Torres said he hopes to reach a settlement with the parish by next
week. 

"There's no way for me to give a concrete 'This was SDT's, this was the
parish's,' " Torres said. "But there's value in the fact that we moved all
that debris through the site and we disposed of it. There was the benefit of
having it there, too, for the parish." 

At the transfer station, residential garbage from St. Bernard and New
Orleans was mixed in with construction debris from throughout the metro
area, then loaded onto trucks and hauled to the landfill for billing based
on informal, undocumented counts at the yard. 

There were no scales to weigh incoming trash and debris, and no on-site
parish officials monitoring whether contractors dumping debris were actually
from St. Bernard. That scenario left the parish open to being billed for
virtually any construction debris brought to the site by private
individuals, including contractors from elsewhere drawn to an open dump
site. 

"I don't know why, in America, we would cut that deal or let that deal
happen. However, it did," said Parish Council Chairman Wayne J. Landry.
"Where I find wrongdoing is that we in the parish, in controlling that land,
should have put procedures in place to control it." 

Taffaro limited his comments on the potential settlement to a statement that
said the administration is reviewing the information from SDT. 

"St. Bernard Parish government wishes to be diligent in its review,
recommendations and conclusion of the current situation which will allow for
a comprehensive answer to the St. Bernard Parish public," he wrote. 

St. Bernard Parish owns the Chalmette transfer site, but then-Parish
President Henry "Junior" Rodriguez's administration handed over operations
to Torres in May 2007 in an attempt to cut down on the mounds of new
construction debris littering the parish. 


SDT records of disposal costs at River Birch over the past year show that
the parish's bill far outpaced the bill for all of SDT's private business
accounts in the months after SDT took over the transfer site. 

In February, for example, the parish was billed for more than 12,000 tons of
garbage while SDT was billed for 3,000 tons. 

The number of tons billed to SDT began to rise gradually as St. Bernard's
bill decreased this spring, when Taffaro's administration started looking
into the high garbage costs. Taffaro received a letter from River Birch
landfill President Jim Ward in January, shortly after Taffaro took office,
warning him of the rising costs. 

By the end of August, St. Bernard's bill was down to 7,000 tons while SDT's
landfill bill had increased to 6,700 tons. 

Torres attributes the growth in SDT's landfill costs, which began last
January, to the expansion of his business in St. Tammany Parish and new
commercial contracts. But SDT's own estimates of its private trash and
debris do not show a similar increase. 

Torres said tonnage can fluctuate widely month to month. Disposal bills at
River Birch each month might not line up with the garbage brought to the
site, he said, because there was still a pile left over from earlier months
of dumping. 

Leaving garbage at a transfer station overnight is a violation of Louisiana
environmental codes. 

Much of SDT's curbside garbage from St. Bernard and New Orleans' French
Quarter, along with trash and debris from SDT's commercial accounts, was
brought to the site and simply mixed into the large pile. Torres said
contractors and many residents also dumped large trailers of debris onto the
pile, because they were unable to offload it into a bin at the site. 

SDT estimates that contractors and residents brought more than 91,000 tons
of debris to the site between January 2007 and August 2008. Based on an SDT
estimate that a single renovated house could generate 4.8 tons of debris,
that would mean that debris from more than 19,000 homes was billed to St.
Bernard Parish during that span. 

That's more than SDT's own St. Bernard household estimate of 16,500 homes. 

Torres admitted that the debris billed to St. Bernard would have included
material from outside the parish, probably from contractors in eastern New
Orleans who brought loads to the site. The number of tons billed to St.
Bernard was mostly a guessing game, calculated by subtracting the number of
SDT trucks that contributed to the large pile, he said. While the parish
took on the bulk of the landfill disposal costs from trash at the transfer
station, Torres points out that he received little or no payment from the
contractors dumping there and was not paid for hauling it to the landfill. 

"From a management side, to do it all over again I would have paid to put
the scales in, I would have paid to have people there," he said. "Being new
at the business and trying to learn the business at the same time as we're
growing our business, our mistake was not to put in the control mechanisms."


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