State officials should not let up on illegal dumping
The large amounts of household trash found dumped in the pine barrens in Yaphank last month led to an investigation by the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Office. Credit: Suffolk County Sheriff
Illegal dumping continues to be a scourge in New York.
Look no further than the household debris found recently in the pine barrens in Yaphank. Or the Port Washington man arrested in July for trucking over 700 cubic yards of illegal material to a Riverhead family farm. The state Department of Environmental Conservation found that the piles included soil mixed with pulverized construction and demolition debris.
It’s the kind of crime that has sullied Long Island for too long, threatening our life-giving groundwater and natural spaces. The DEC must continue to prioritize this kind of enforcement.
The agency’s role in helping to stop dumping is crucial. That includes its solid waste regulations, some of which the DEC is proposing to revise in questionable ways. For example, those who dispose construction and demolition waste must complete tracking documents to make sure that material goes where it’s supposed to go and is disposed of safely. A 2020 law sponsored by Assemb. Steve Englebright (D-Setauket) and former Sen. Todd Kaminsky (D-Long Beach) mandated that the generators and transporters of such waste coming out of New York City fill out a tracking document declaring that the information on the document is true and that the person signing it is “aware that any false statement made on this document is punishable pursuant to Section 210.45 of the Penal Law.”
The DEC is proposing that the tracking document and certification process remain with the same potential penalties, but without guaranteed inclusion of that explicit legal language. That's worrisome.
The agency’s rationale is that waste companies might want to present their own tracking system — perhaps electronic — rather than use the document, and petition the agency to see whether that system serves the same legal purposes as the document. This supposedly would provide more “flexibility.” The DEC also wants to remove the requirement that the tracking documents actually get returned to the agency. That would be an “unnecessary burden,” according to the DEC, which instead proposes that the waste transporter provide copies of the tracking documents to the receiving user or facility, where they must be held.
If the removal and disposal of construction and demolition waste was a squeaky-clean business in New York, we might agree with the loosening of some bureaucratic restrictions. But the industry has for too long included bad actors who cut corners or commit fraud. Consider the 40,000 tons of contaminated construction debris discovered in Brentwood’s Roberto Clemente Park in 2014. A 130-count indictment and the Kaminsky-Englebright law soon followed.
It doesn't seem necessary to lower the bar for this industry already. The extra steps that make it easier for prosecutors to bring illegal dumping cases have to be a deterrent. As Englebright wrote in an August letter to the DEC, potentially skipping the specific legal language would “remove a simple tool to deter improper handling and disposal of wastes.”
Every little bit helps, while the dumping continues.
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