License stays in limbo

We'll let you know soon, the Ohio EPA tells the health board.
By PETER H. MILLIKEN
VINDICATOR TRUMBULL STAFF
WARREN -- Next year's operating license for the Warren Recycling Inc. transfer station is still in limbo with just over two months remaining before the Dec. 31 expiration of this year's license.
In a letter dated Wednesday, the Ohio EPA recommended that the city health board postpone its decision on the license renewal pending the outcome of an OEPA background investigation of the transfer station operators.
The Ohio EPA will make a recommendation as soon as Director Joseph P. Koncelik reviews the background, Lynn Sowers, the agency's supervisor of solid and infectious waste management, wrote in a letter to Dr. James A. Lazor, city health commissioner.
Sowers told city health board members that she couldn't give a specific date for the notification, but that it would be before the end of this year. The background check is done every year, she added.
The health board took no action concerning the transfer station license renewal at its Wednesday meeting.
Background check
The transfer station has operated in "substantial compliance" with state laws and regulations, but the OEPA hasn't finally determined WRI's eligibility for license renewal because it is still doing the background check, Sowers wrote to Lazor.
A day earlier, Daniel Harris, chief of the OEPA's division of solid and infectious waste management, had also written to Lazor that the transfer station was in substantial compliance and the health board can't consider the compliance status of WRI's landfill when it decides on renewal of WRI's transfer station license.
The WRI transfer station is a place where garbage collected in city-owned trucks is loaded onto larger trucks to be taken to BFI's Poland landfill.
The WRI landfill is a construction and demolition debris landfill that closed at the end of last year and is now being cleaned up by the U.S. EPA.
Error in letter
In Tuesday's letter, Harris wrote that he had erred in a Sept. 12 letter in which he asked the city health board to deny the transfer station's 2006 license unless WRI enters "a satisfactory consent agreement" with OEPA concerning the landfill before Dec. 31.
In the Sept. 12 letter, Harris told Lazor the Ohio attorney general's office filed contempt charges against WRI on March 11, 2004, in Trumbull County Common Pleas Court because WRI didn't comply with a consent order.
That July 1, 2003, deal involved Warren Hills, the company that managed Warren Recycling Inc., the OEPA, and the Ohio attorney general's office.
Since 1999, the company had accepted industrial solid waste in the landfill, which was licensed to take only construction and demolition debris. Warren Recycling agreed to pay a $30,000 civil penalty for violations and creating a nuisance or health hazard.
No comment
Rick Jones, transfer station manager, declined to comment on the station's license renewal after Wednesday's health board meeting.
Debbie Roth, president of Our Lives Count, an advocacy group for the landfill's neighbors, said she opposes renewal of the transfer station's license because the landfill's operators are in bankruptcy and "they have not demonstrated that they can successfully operate any facility, in my opinion."