CONCORD, N.H. — Other states dump trash in New Hampshire at a rate of around 900,000 tons per year, in large part because those neighbors have significantly stricter landfill rules.
The Department of Environmental Services says its new regulations – currently in the process of being updated, as required every decade – will be more protective of human health and the environment than the current ones.
But critics say companies that operate landfills have had outsized influence in the rulemaking process and that the proposed regulations will allow New Hampshire to remain the dumping ground of New England.
Those who have raised concerns about industry’s influence have pointed to a proposed criterion for ground permeability that is magnitudes weaker than other states, which DES weakened in response to claims from industry that were made without evidence, and a council that advised DES through the rulemaking process that had vacancies in key roles like public interest and health.
Ever-present in the dialogue on the rules, too, is that DES wrote them while simultaneously in receipt of an active permit filed by Casella Waste Systems to build a landfill in the small town of Dalton, just half a mile from Forest Lake.
Michael Wimsatt, the department’s waste management division director, said the rulemaking and permit application are “separate processes,” noting that, at this stage, DES is simply checking that Casella has submitted all the necessary information.
He described the proposed rules in starkly different terms than their critics, calling them, “in virtually every respect, better, stronger, more protective than our existing rules.”
“People have said that these rules are weakening our existing rules,” Wimsatt said. “I don’t think anything could be further than the truth from that.”
Casella, in a statement from Jeff Weld, its vice president of communications, said the proposed rules were a “step forward in advancing” the goals laid out in the state’s solid waste management plan.
“It is imperative that all stakeholders are given an opportunity to provide input during the rulemaking process,” the statement said, “and we were one of many service providers in this space, along with other environmental experts and the general public to do so.”
Though Rep. Nicholas Germana, a Keene Democrat who served on a House subcommittee that followed the rulemaking process, has criticisms of the rules, he said they have been improved in some ways, such as adding more monitoring. Additionally, the current 200-foot setback from water bodies has been extended to 500 feet.
But the representative said that it would make more sense for New Hampshire – like all the other states he’s aware of – to focus on the time it would take for pollutants to get to water bodies, not what he called an “arbitrary” distance.
“What matters is if there was a leak in this site,” he said, “how long would it take to get to a body of water?”
An outlier
A major point of divergence between DES and critics is the department’s proposed standard for hydraulic conductivity, a metric that describes how easily water, including the polluted liquid called leachate that leaks out of landfills, moves through the ground.
Water moves more quickly through some materials, like gravel and coarse sand, than others, like clay and silt.
No hydraulic conductivity standard exists in the current rules, but the figure proposed by DES – which could still change as the department weighs the feedback it received in the public comment period that closed earlier this month – would allow landfills to be built on ground that is much more permeable than that allowed by other states.
Asked in an interview why New Hampshire’s proposed standard is so much weaker than other states, Wimsatt said, “I’m just not gonna comment on that.”
“At this point, we’re still working on these rules,” he said. “I don’t really think it’s appropriate for me to engage in a really detailed discussion of that.”
He rejected the comparison to other states when asked similar questions by House subcommittee members in March, calling it “apples to oranges.”‘
Unbalanced’ guidance
The Waste Management Council gave guidance to DES throughout the rulemaking process, but five of its 13 seats were vacant and a quarter of the members were directly from industry, which some critics say slanted the input.
The council – the members of which are appointed by the governor and the Executive Council – has long had unfilled positions in areas such as a public interest representative, a public health expert, a municipal official, one of the two slots for an elected official, and a member of the business or financial community.
Wimsatt said that, though he would like the empty positions to be filled, he doesn’t feel the absences negatively impacted the rulemaking process.
What’s next
It will be months before the final rules are adopted, Wimsatt said.
First, the department has to review the approximately 70 written and 14 oral comments received during the public comment period, he said, and “determine whether any of those indicate a need to change any of the particular provisions of the initial proposal.”
DES must then present the rules to the Joint Legislative Committee on Administrative Rules. The department aims to do that around August or September, Wimsatt said, and then the final rules would be adopted about a month after that.
Lawmakers can put stricter guidelines in place for landfills outside the regulatory process, something Germana and other legislators will seek to do next session.
A number of landfill bills passed the House overwhelmingly this year, only to be killed in the Senate. Germana would like to continue to push for the idea of state-owned landfills, where New Hampshire would own the land but lease out the operations to private companies.
He would also like to see a more robust system for public input in the regulatory process.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat or a or a Republican,” Germana said, “your constituents want and deserve clean air and clean water and clean land.
New Hampshire Bulletin is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
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New Hampshire Bulletin is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
