THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, July 12, 1994 TAG: 9407120326
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DEBBIE MESSINA, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: Medium: 57 lines
The city's highway department has been filling a borrow pit along Oceana Boulevard for seven years without permits from the City Council or the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The corps has ordered the city to stop dumping concrete, sand and rock into the lake until it completes the permitting process under the Clean Water Act, which could take anywhere from several weeks to months.
Meanwhile, the highway department will ask the City Council today for a conditional-use permit for the landfill operation.
``The city staff did not follow the same rules and regulations we expect the citizens to follow,'' said Mayor Meyera E. Oberndorf. ``If we are the government, we are to be the role models. We need to follow any of the ordinances we have for the private sector.''
The irregularity became apparent after a local business questioned why it was required to endure a two-year process of securing a city permit to fill the other end of the same lake while the city was not subject to scrutiny.
``Our goal is to get a landfill and not to get the city,'' said John Baillio of Baillio Sand Co. ``but we certainly brought it to their attention.''
Baillio applied for a conditional-use permit in April 1992, and it was granted in February 1994. The city applied in April 1994 and it's scheduled for council vote today.
The city owns the southern portion of the 8-acre borrow pit, and Baillio owns the northern portion. Both are preparing applications for the corps permit.
City highway administrator Joe Russell said he was not aware that any permits were necessary.
Russell said he was told by the city's planning and engineering departments when the fill operation began in 1987 that ``the city does not have to issue a permit to regulate itself because the city already regulates itself.''
Plus, he said, the staff from the corps had visited the site over the past several years and indicated that no corps permit was needed.
R. Harold Jones, the corps' chief of the southern Virginia regulatory section, said that ruling might have occurred, but he said he has no record of any corps clearances to operate the landfill. He added that he only recently learned of the city's fill operation and that it does come under the corps' jurisdiction.
Jones said fines and administrative action for failing to seek a permit are possible, but not likely.
Over the past seven years, the city has filled about half of its portion of the lake with ditch-cleaning spoils, sand, rock, and concrete curbs and gutter and sidewalks. It will take about five to seven more years to complete the fill operation. The abandoned borrow pit is in an industrial area where several borrow pits are operating. by CNB