LOS ANGELES (AP) — A Los Angeles County battery recycling plant with a long history of violations of air pollution and hazardous waste laws will close under an agreement with federal prosecutors that requires the company to spend $50 million to clean up the site and surrounding neighborhoods.
The deal will result in the immediate and permanent shuttering of the Exide Technologies plant, Acting U.S. Attorney Stephanie Yonekura said Thursday. The agreement, which prevents criminal prosecution, was designed so the company could emerge from bankruptcy and afford the cleanup rather than being forced to liquidate.
“If the company was no longer viable, we would no longer be able to achieve the immediate result of the facility’s closure, and the government would be left holding the bag for the cleanup,” Yonekura said. “In short, this is the best solution for a very difficult environmental problem.”
The cleanup will be overseen by the California Department of Toxic Substances Control, which said Thursday it would issue an order to close the facility after finding it cannot operate in compliance with public health and environmental safeguards.
Exide said it entered the agreement after the state said it probably would reject the company’s permits to operate a hazardous waste facility. The plant never went through the full regulatory process for an operating permit.
“They’ve operated under a learner’s permit for 35 years,” said Angelo Bellomo, environmental health director for Los Angeles County.
The 15-acre plant 5 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles had been idle for a year amid legal and environmental battles, but its owners hoped to reopen. The company had said it was spending $25 million on the cleanup and emphasized that its output of pollutants met public health standards even when it sometimes fell short of environmental regulations.
Local, state and federal officials have for years cited Exide for emitting too much lead and arsenic and for violating hazardous waste laws in and around the plant and on the highways where its trucks traveled.
Neighbors concerned about their health have become vocal in recent years about the plant’s lack of regulation, and have called for its closure.
“Our long nightmare is over,” Msgr. John Moretta of Resurrection Church in Boyle Heights said on behalf of community groups that have protested the plant. “We have attended dozens and dozens of meetings and hearings always fighting for what we saw as something obvious: Exide was poisoning our community and had to be closed.”
The agreement will hold Exide responsible for using $38.6 million it agreed to set aside last fall for closure and cleanup of its site and another $9 million for cleaning up soil around 216 surrounding homes. After those homes are cleaned up, the company will expand cleanup to other areas, federal prosecutors said.
Cleanup is expected to take at least five years.
In the non-prosecution agreement, the company admitted it violated four felonies on a daily basis for 20 years by trucking battery waste from Los Angeles to a facility in Bakersfield that wasn’t permitted to receive hazardous waste, prosecutors said.
If it doesn’t follow through with the deal in the next 10 years, the company or its successor could face charges of illegal dumping, storage and transportation of hazardous waste and for illegally transporting hazardous waste to an unpermitted facility, which each carry fines of up to $500,000 per day for each violation.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph John said the decision was a tough one for prosecutors, but it made more sense for the community.
“We decided that the right thing to do was not worry about sending one or two people to jail for a year or two, but rather prevent another 50- to 100-year sentence for 110,000 people,” Johns said.
Political pressure was mounting on Exide, which operated under interim status since the 1980s and was being cited for violations even as it sat idle for the past year. Earlier this week, state Senate leader Kevin de Leon of Los Angeles sent a letter urging the Department of Toxic Substances Control to deny a permit to the recycler.
“There is no reason why this facility should continue to operate,” De Leon wrote.
A few days before De Leon’s letter, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency cited Exide for four new violations of the Clean Air Act, according to an EPA violation notice obtained by the Los Angeles Times, which first reported the closure Wednesday night.
Exide, based in Milton, Georgia, said 130 jobs would be lost by permanently closing the plant. The company operates in more than 80 countries and employs about 10,000 workers.
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Information from: Los Angeles Times, http://www.latimes.com/
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