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Tons of compacted Hawaiian trash await OK on shipment plan to Roosevelt

By Erik Robinson
Published: April 8, 2010, 12:00am

Trash is stacking up, and patience is wearing thin for a plan to ship municipal garbage from Hawaii up the Columbia River.

Some Honolulu City Council members are growing restless about more than 20,000 tons of compacted trash destined for Southwest Washington that is stacking up at Oahu’s Campbell Industrial Park.

The Seattle-based company that holds the city contract to ship the trash to the mainland has postponed the start of the shipments at least 10 times. It’s now awaiting a final permit from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Council members Ikaika Anderson and Ann Kobayashi said Tuesday at a meeting of the Council Public Infrastructure Committee that they feel the company misled the city.

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No one from Hawaiian Waste Systems was present at the meeting to rebut the criticism, but the company’s new president told The Columbian late Wednesday that he’s as dismayed as anyone. He said the firm’s previous president, Jim Hodge, resigned abruptly a month ago.

“We were all misled by Mr. Hodge,” said Mike Chutz, a minority shareholder who now serves as president of the company. “Mr. Hodge’s biggest mistake of all is that he was overly optimistic, by a great deal, in terms of his idea about when Hawaiian Waste Systems would receive the necessary permits from the USDA.”

Attempts by The Columbian to reach Hodge for comment were unsuccessful.

A city official said Honolulu isn’t out any money because it doesn’t pay Hawaiian Waste Systems LLC $99.89 a ton until the trash is placed in a landfill on the north bank of the Columbia River in Roosevelt, east of Goldendale and across the river from Arlington, Ore.

Indeed, Chutz said, the company has invested a “significant” amount to bail and hold the trash at the site in Honolulu “with no offsetting revenue whatsoever.”

Hawaiian Waste Systems was supposed to start sending the garbage in October, but the company changed its offloading plans and is now awaiting a review by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Rather than shipping the trash by barge through the Columbia River Gorge to the regional landfill, the company decided in 2009 to offload the compacted, shrink-wrapped municipal waste at Longview, Portland or Rainier, Ore., then haul it by rail or truck to Roosevelt.

A USDA spokesman in Sacramento, Calif., said earlier this year that the agency had to review whether the new plan presented any additional threat of introducing non-native pests from Oahu.

“We don’t have the luxury of saying, ‘Gee whiz, it’s all the Columbia River. It all looks the same to us,’ ” agency spokesman Larry Hawkins said.

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On Wednesday, Chutz said the company had settled on an offloading site at the Port of Longview, where it anticipates loading 10 to 15 rail cars a day with containerized trash bound for Roosevelt. Hawkins said the formal review has to take into account additional public comments on the amended plan.

“Provided that there are no issues that come up that have not been adequately covered in the environmental assessment, then the next step would be to go ahead and have a finding of no significant impact,” Hawkins said.

From that point, he said, it would take another couple of weeks to prepare a compliance agreement between the company and the USDA.

“We want to do the right thing,” Chutz said.

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