Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, May 10, 1990 TAG: 9005100493
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A14 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Right. And Michael Milken should have been allowed to make a few more insider stock deals so he could pay his court fines.
And the baseball commissioner should have let Pete Rose bet on more games so he could buy the Cincinnati Reds some bats and balls.
The company's record suggests Kim-Stan will turn environmentally responsible when the polluted Jackson River flows upstream.
The state wants to take away the landfill's operating permit by late May for running an open dump and flouting Virginia law.
Be nice to us, says Kim-Stan, and we'll give Alleghany County a present: $1.50 a ton of garbage through Dec. 31.
Meantime, however, the company wants public sewage plants in the area to treat its polluted water at $10,000 to $12,000 a month and save Kim-Stan up to $300,000 a month it's paying to ship the leachate out of state.
Kim-Stan also wants to curtail environmental monitoring of water on the site, said to cost the firm as much as $25,000 a month.
The owners are as much suggesting they went broke trying to meet all the state's rules and regulations.
Maybe they think the government's job is to suspend enforcement and trust to the company's good intentions. Under an agreement with the state last year, Kim-Stan was to have paid half a million dollars by now into a fund to pay for closure.
State officials say the fund stands at $55,000. So much for the company's promises and performance.
But if you're not nice to us, says Kim-Stan, you get only problems. If the state shuts the dump down, declares Kim-Stan lawyer Joe Roberts, the workers and leased equipment probably will disappear; there's no money for them, either.
No money? What happened to all the cash Kim-Stan's owners have presumably been piling up while accepting Northeast cities' garbage for two years?
There appears to be enough money to pay for more legal delays. Roberts complained the state hasn't given proper notice of efforts to close the dump, and said he might appeal all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Let him. If anything, Kim-Stan has been served notice - and the state has failed to act - for far too long.
Kim-Stan has had ample opportunity to do the right thing with the landfill. If the state must dip into its own funds to close the landfill safely - and then try to collect from the owners - so be it.
The public's been dumped on enough.
by CNB