Six years later, MPCA requests info on demo landfill

Commissioners will advocate area legislators to set deadlines for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) to respond to the permitting requests.
Six years after the Rock County Land Management Office submitted an application to renew its state permit, MPCA officials last week stated the application was incomplete.
“We submitted our (30-page) application for the demolition landfill permit back as submitted on March 23, 2009,” said Eric Hartman, land management director.
“This is the first piece of correspondence that I have received from the MPCA pertinent to the permit application.”
The letter, dated May 21, 2015, came from MPCA hydrologist Mark Rys.
“We try to get to them as soon possible,” Rys said when contacted by phone.
Paperwork received by MPCA is prioritized, he said, and Rys recently reviewed Rock County’s application.
“I need information to do my job here,” he said, which is to reassure the state that the local demolition landfill was meeting MPCA standards.
Rock County has 45 days to submit the information requested by Rys, which includes an updated ground water monitoring and sampling plan. The request also asks for tabulated analytical testing data from the past five years.
Hartman will comply with the request.
Since 1995, the demolition landfill is monitored multiple times by a third-party contractor.
County Administrator Kyle Oldre said he forwarded the MPCA letter to Senator Bill Weber and Representative Joe Schomacher.
“How can this be acceptable?” Oldre said.
“In any way, at any level of government, at any time can it take six years to review an application and then at the six-year point say ‘Oh by the way, we need information from the previous five years.’”