GAINESVILLE — Sometimes the air smells so bad that Esco Riley’s grandchildren won’t go outside to play.
The stench, Riley believes, originates in a landfill nearby that is owned by Gov. Nathan Deal’s longtime business partner. The smell arises from the dump, he says, drifts over the car salvage lot that Deal and his partner own together, wafts across the highway and poisons the air in Riley’s neighborhood with a headache-inducing odor.
“It smells like a sewer, like a septic tank,” Riley said, scrunching his nose as he stood across a busy highway that separated his home from Gainesville Salvage & Disposal.
Riley said the landfill was supposed to be for construction waste, but birds circle the site — when they’re not making deposits on his roof. He suspects that spoiled meat and other more pungent wastes are dumped there. “Those birds ain’t eating plywood and concrete,” he said.
The landfill is owned by Ken Cronan, Deal’s business partner, and is one of several landfills in the African-American neighborhood. On Thursday the Hall County Commission is expected to approve a rezoning for another one, next to the Deal salvage yard, on land owned by one of the governor’s leading contributors.
Riley, who is fighting it, knows what he’s up against. “There are some powerful people behind this thing,” he said.
The commission is considering a request of DOJI Properties to rezone about 51 acres next to the Deal salvage yard. It would create business parcels along U.S. 129 and enable creation of a landfill on the property.
The company lists James Walters as its registered agent and his business as its address, according to records on file with the Georgia Secretary of State. Walters and his company contributed more than $24,000 to Deal’s 2010 gubernatorial campaign. Walters also leased office space to Deal’s campaign and served as chairman of the bank that provided the campaign with a $250,000 line of credit.
Deal appointed Walters to the Georgia Ports Authority Board at the same time the governor appointed his salvage yard business partner, Ken Cronan, to the panel.
Neither Walters nor Cronan returned phone calls seeking comment.
During an October hearing of the Hall County Planning Commission, an engineer for the project said a portion of the property would be used by Deal and Cronan’s business, according to a copy of the meeting minutes obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. After he was elected governor, Deal put his assets in a blind trust and he has no involvement in the day-to-day operations of the business.
Hall County, in a project report it filed with the state Department of Community Affairs, described the project as an “expansion of existing automotive salvage yard and landfill.”
Deal spokesman Brian Robinson said, “He [the governor] doesn’t have anything to do with this. He is not involved. The governor’s share in GSD is in a blind trust, he is not involved in the management. He is the governor of Georgia, that’s what he does. He just happens to own a share of the business that’s next door [to the proposed landfill].”
Deal’s landfill quest
Directly south of Deal and Cronan’s business, also abutting Walters’ property, Cronan owns another landfill. Deal previously co-owned the property where the landfill, incorporated as Gainesville Waste & Recycling, sits.
Deal and Cronan worked for years to win state approval for the landfill, located alongside a long-closed county dump. The partners bought the property in 2002, with Cronan assuming “full ownership” in 2003, Robinson, the governor’s spokesman, told the AJC in 2010.
But Gainesville Waste & Recycling has the same address as Gainesville Salvage & Disposal. Deal and Cronan also jointly applied for state environmental permits for the landfill in 2007, the AJC reported, with both men signing the application twice.
Deal was listed as an officer in the landfill business as recently as 2007, but in 2008 Cronan amended the records to remove Deal’s name.
State regulators objected to the landfill for several years.
Deal and Cronan eventually succeeded secured a rezoning from Hall County; after Cronan agreed to design changes intended to protect groundwater, the state granted a permit in 2010.
Beginning late last year, Cronan began applying for state permits to expand his landfill, first adding a composting operation and then adding recycling of restaurant waste. This summer, Cronan applied to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to dramatically expand the size of the operation. The Corp’s permission is needed because the landfill comes close to a protected waterway, Allen Creek, which already is on the state’s list of polluted waters.
On the table now
Jeff Cown, state Environmental Protection Division solid waste program manager, said EPD in January agreed to let Cronan’s landfill compost food waste and sludge from wastewater plants. Cown said the operation mixes the food and treated sewage and lays it out in rows, turning it frequently. The resulting compost can later be sold as a soil additive, he said.
The process can produce an odor if done incorrectly, he said.
An EPD inspector, who went to the site last week in response to odor complaints, advised adding substances such as wood chips to the mix and blanketing the rows with seasoned compost to reduce the smell.
Residents fear that Walters’ landfill, if its is permitted, will follow the path blazed by Cronan and begin accepting compost and other organic waste, essentially blending the contiguous landfills into one large operation.
Sally Bethea, founding director of the environmental group Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, said the group is concerned about the expansion of landfill operations near Allen Creek, which already is on the state’s list of polluted waterways.
“Most of what we are concerned with right now is happening on the [Cronan] site,” she said, noting that Cronan got state permits to handle composting and restaurant waste in “record time.”
The latest proposed site sits near Allen Creek Soccer Complex, and across the street from a landfill run by Waste Management Co. Neighbors say there are already seven or eight landfills in the immediate area, and they don’t want any more. Esco Riley said he has collected more than 250 signatures on petitions opposing the zoning change, and opponents rallied against it Tuesday night after the polls closed.
Atlanta-based environmental law firm GreenLaw is looking into the rezoning for the Newtown Florist Club, an evironmental activist group. GreenLaw executive director Stephanie Stuckey Benfield said state law limits the number of landfills to no more than three in a two-mile radius. But she said many exemptions allow landfill developers to get around the law.
‘Another landfill?’
Along with Cronan’s operation, the area around Walters’ proposed landfill is home to other dumps and recycling operations. Greenlaw is researching those operations, Benfield said.
Faye Bush, executive director of the the Newtown Florist Club, said in a letter to county officials, “The proposed construction of this site would in effect continue the practice of environmental racism that has produced more than 13 industries within a two-mile radius of our community. We believe and have supporting scientific research that shows this policy has created an environmental toxic cocktail that has increased the levels of cancer and illness in our community.”
Brian Rochester of Rochester & Associates, which represented DOJI before the Hall County planning board, promised there would be no household waste in the landfill. But he didn’t make any promises concerning restaurant or commercial food waste, according to the meeting’s minutes. He said the landfill would be used for debris from the next-door salvage yard.
Locals have trouble believing the landfill will be a benign neighbor.
The Rev. Evelyn Johnson of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, said the stench often reaches her church, which is about a mile from the site.
“If we have at least seven or eight landfills already,” she said, “why are you going to impose on us another landfill?”
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