Blowin' in the wind

Landfill baron Charlie Gifford lands a job in Nantucket

by Johnette Rodriguez

Charlie Gifford has never been one to let criticism get roversy since 1985, when hihim down. Embroiled in controversy since 1985, when his North Kingstown construction and demolition landfill was added to a federal list of potentially hazardous waste disposal sites, he nonetheless ran for Congress in 1990 -- on a platform based partially on his expressed concern over the Central Landfill in Johnston.

Last fall, he negotiated a two-year, $3 million contract to operate the Massachusetts town of Nantucket's Madaket Landfill while continuing to wrestle with Rhode Island officials over a caustic stench emanating from his North Kingstown facility on Dry Bridge Road. What's more, Gifford hopes to manage the island's waste site well into the next century -- on April 15, Nantucket's annual Town Meeting will vote on whether to approve a 25-year contract with the attorney and real estate developer.

For the last 10 years, Gifford, a North Kingstown resident himself, has managed to outrun any opposition he has encountered -- from the North Kingstown Town Council and the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (DEM) to a North Kingstown neighborhood group called Residents Against the Landfill (RALF) and the Rhode Island Attorney General's office.

In a 1992 issue of Waste Dynamics of New England, Gifford proudly advertises that he operates the only "properly licensed landfill in the state of Rhode Island." The problem is that DEM has sometimes struggled with just how to apply state laws and regulations to Gifford's landfill operations.

In March, DEM levied more than $175,000 in fines against Gifford's Hometown Properties company after neighbors renewed their complaints that hydrogen sulfide gas blowing over from the Dry Bridge Road site was giving them headaches, sore throats, chronic bronchitis and increased asthma attacks.

While Gifford did not return phone calls from the Phoenix, he did talk to a reporter from Nantucket's The Inquirer and Mirror about his problems back in Rhode Island. The DEM fines were "nothing but politics, pure and simple," he said, and would not hold up in court.

So once again Gifford finds his Rhode Island company, Hometown Properties, very much in the news at a time when he's trying to establish a whole new venture on the island of Nantucket. His contract there is through another company, Waste Options, Inc., which he incorporated in 1993 in Delaware. Waste Options is a two-person operation, with Gifford as president and treasurer and Trina Maura as secretary and vice president.

Nantucket officials put their landfill's operations out to bid last summer after the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) warned them that the site had to be capped and brought up to code by January 1, 1999. According to Pam Killen, a member of Nantucket's Board of Selectmen, the town received only two responses to its request for proposals, or RFPs -- one from Waste Options and another from a company in Fairhaven, Massachusetts. Killen says the latter didn't appear as financially solvent as Gifford`s company, which selectmen characterized as the town`s "last, best hope" to tame the dump's overflowing mess.

After winning the bid, Gifford signed an interim operating agreement that set performance standards for Waste Options, Inc. According to Nantucket's Department of Public Works director Jeff Willett, these standards include capping the old landfill and hauling away much of the accumulated trash, running the current recycling and waste facility, and constructing a $10 million composting plant and lined landfill cells for the burial of certain wastes at the Madaket facility. The composting plant, expected to be state-of-the art, would produce a saleable composted product from household waste and would lengthen the landfill's life by another 50 years.

"If a community is able to recycle 30 to 40 percent of their waste stream, they are considered to be doing an excellent job," says Willett. "What we propose to do is to recycle 80 percent of it."

Willett called the arrangement with Waste Options a "public/private partnership" that puts the company in charge of daily operations while the town retains ownership of the site, the facility, and the equipment.

While this may look good on paper, Phil Bartlett, chairman of the town's Finance Committee, is concerned about the deal. Waste Options, he says, never posted any performance bonds. "I don't know this guy [Gifford] from a hole in the head. If he dies tomorrow, what would we do? His own insurance people suggested bonds, but they're not in the contract."

Selectman Tim Soverino, who formed a subcommittee of two with Killen to study the landfill bids and negotiate a contract with Gifford, looks at it differently. "Waste Options's contract was so capital-intensive in the beginning that we felt his security was his performance. At the end of 26 months, we will have paid $3.5 million to Waste Options, but he will have paid out $15 million." Waste Options will recoup this money by splitting the profits generated by the off-island sale of composted recyclables and soil with the town.

In response to Bartlett's concern about the performance bonds, Soverino says the selectmen are working out this issue with Gifford. "We think it's redundant, but it's important for us to have the chairman of the Finance Committee speak positively about this."

That it is. For Bartlett says he is prepared to "stand up on the town floor [at the April Town meeting] and blast 'em if I don't get the answers that I want."

Bartlett was also upset over how the two selectmen went about hiring Gifford's company. "I found out about it the day before they signed the contract. How did they make this decision? On the advice of who? Basically themselves. None of their consultants had any connection to Nantucket," he says. "Why shouldn't the town finance it and pay this guy as a service contractor? The town just threw up their hands and said, `Let someone else do it.' "

Soverino's response to this is that there is no precedent to consult with the Finance Committee on every contract negotiated for the town. "We've learned our lesson," he says. "Government is about building consensus, especially on contracts with longterm and large-dollar implications."

What Gifford has already done at Madaket is truck away tons of metal and thousands of tires that were piled up on the 25-acre site and ship them off-island. His staff has also collected most of the windblown trash that was such an embarrassment to the pristine nature of Nantucket -- and an attraction to a flock of seagulls so dense, they blackened the skies. Jeff Willett feels good about this, as do many other residents.

He and Killen are also confident that Gifford's plans for a composting plant will help solve Nantucket's own odor problem at its sewage treatment plant, which conducts open-air composting. According to the contract, Waste Options is obligated to take the wastewater sludge to the landfill and compost it in the new composting plant, at approximately two dump truckloads a month during eight months of the year and perhaps as many as five truckloads a week during the peak summer season, says Willett.

If the town had to ship their landfill waste off-island, it could cost as much as $200 a ton, according to Killen. The Waste Options agreement charges the town $90 a ton this year, moving up to $180 by the year 2022. This is based on an estimated average of 24,000 tons a year, and some residents wonder what will happen if recycling efforts cut this tonnage. Will payments to Waste Options be renegotiated? Will residential user fees increase?

A grassroots rallying point

In North Kingstown, Gifford's landfill has been a grassroots rallying point and a political hot potato almost since the beginning. In 1980, the landfill was licensed to accept railroad ties on 6.9 acres of a former gravel pit. Later, this license was expanded to allow for the disposal of demolition and construction debris and was renewed annually until June 1986, when Hometown applied to expand the landfill by another 14.1 acres.

Also in '86, a contractor hired by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the state DEM's Groundwater Section began to investigate a possible link between the Dry Bridge Road landfill and four North Kingstown town wells. The landfill site is above the underground aquifer supplying these wells, which are downhill from the disposal site. Given this, monitoring wells were installed to test the groundwater, and DEM ultimately denied Hometown's expansion request after several contaminants were found to exceed drinking water standards.

Months of administrative hearings gave Gifford no relief. In fact, DEM even issued Waste Options a "Notice of Violation" in January 1988 because of the landfill's noxious odors.

When a DEM hearing officer later upheld the denial of Hometown's license, Gifford sued in Superior Court. Appealing to the state Supreme Court, the town of North Kingstown and DEM joined forces, but in January 1990 the court decreed that Hometown could no longer be denied its license.

Over the next six years, Gifford continued to battle with the town and its residents. In 1995, Hometown applied to expand the height of its landfill to 50 feet and to delay closing the site until the year 2000. For the neighbors who had endured the odors, noise, and dust from the landfill, the eyesore of such a trash mound heaped insult onto injury.

The town sued to block the expansion, but DEM eventually approved the plan. Today, the mound grows higher everyday, according to residents.

In 1992, Gifford went on the offensive in a different way, slapping Nancy Hsu Fleming with a defamation suit for comments she made about the landfill in a letter to DEM. But after two pieces of legislation were passed in the Rhode Island General Assemly to prohibit such "strategic lawsuits against public participation" (SLAPP suits), the state Supreme Court ruled in favor of Fleming two years ago.

In response to the Notice of Violation issued by DEM in January (and an attached fine of $33,750), Hometown applied to use an odor-suppressing covering called Posi-Shell, a mixture of cement dust, recycled newspapers, polyester fibers and water that is sprayed over the top of landfills to trap smells and keep out rainwater. They began spraying this cover on February 11, but on March 4, DEM placed its additional $175,000 fine on Hometown.

"The Department had never seen this substance used in Rhode Island, and our engineers had to make contacts in other states to be able to give approval for its use," says DEM associate director Edward Syzmanski, who oversees waste matters in Rhode Island. "We had a responsibility to the rest of Rhode Island to see if what he had proposed had some likelihood of success."

Linda Cole, founder of RALF, expresses neighbors' skepticism about Posi-Shell. "We feel it may have worked on closed landfills, but there's no evidence that it's effective on continuously operating landfills. Engineers have told us that the gas may begin to creep out laterally."

In February, US Rep. Robert Weygand, now a North Kingstown resident himself, asked Attorney General Jeffrey Pine to push for an injunction to close the landfill until the odor problem is resolved. But Washington County Superior Court Judge Frank J. Williams denied Pine's request. Instead, Williams announced that he'd make both surprise and announced visits to the landfill to see how well Gifford is controlling the rotten-egg stench. An informal meeting between Williams and the lawyers involved is scheduled for April 18.

Meanwhile, Gifford has put his North Kingstown home up for sale, and he is focusing primarily on the Nantucket project. In Rhode Island, one of his Hometown partners, Michael Baker, has been handling the current odor crisis at the North Kingstown landfill.

Indeed, it would seem that Charlie Gifford has moved on to grander arenas than Dry Bridge Road. He is quoted in The Inquirer and Mirror as planning to build composting plants in sites as far-flung as Ireland, Aruba, and Japan.