County renews legal deal

MOSES LAKE — Grant County has renewed its agreement with the Seattle law firm that had been handling the cleanup of the county’s landfill in Ephrata.

The commission renewed its arrangement with Nellermoe Wren founding partner Leslie Nellermoe, handing legal matters for Grant County pertaining to the landfill for most of the last decade.

“We do what we can in house, but it’s a balancing act and we try to do the best we can for taxpayers,” said Jim Mitchell, the Grant County deputy prosecutor for civil law.

Mitchell said it is not unusual for a county prosecuting attorney to hire and deputize outside counsel in dealing with very specialized law, such as environmental law.

Nellermoe, who said she has been assisting Grant County with the landfill in Ephrata for “seven or eight years,” said she specializes primarily in dealing with contamination from old landfills and the toxic mess they frequently leave behind.

The current county landfill was owned and operated by the city of Ephrata from the early 1940s until 1974, when it passed into county hands. For much of its early history, the landfill operated as an “open dump,” taking and burying any kind of garbage delivered to them, including barrels of paint, oil, solvents, and industrial waste.

Some of those barrels corroded and leaked over time, leeching poisonous chemicals into the ground and contaminating groundwater. While not officially an Environmental Protection Agency “Superfund” site, the landfill comes under the umbrella of the state’s Model Toxics Control Act, and “superfund” is common shorthand to refer to any contaminated place undergoing government supervised cleanup.

“The site is complicated,” Nellermoe said. “There’s a complex ownership history, complicated ecology, and some cost sharing. It’s not that unusual that everyone involved in a ‘superfund’ site wants someone else to pay the bill.”

Mitchell said Nellermoe cost the county $2,400 in 2015, an amount he also said doesn’t vary much from year to year. Nellermoe said that while her fees vary from year to year, depending on how much work she does for Grant County, the bulk of them are paid by grants from the state and by the county’s insurers.

Brook Beeler, a communications manager with the Washington Department of Ecology, echoed that the geology underneath Ephrata is “complex,” and that makes figuring out the extent of the contamination difficult.

“There’s basalt, and pockets of groundwater, so there are multiple plumes,” she said. “Some of the groundwater is contaminated, and some of it isn’t.”

State officials supervising the cleanup had to drill more wells and take more samples than expected, Nellermoe said. However, the state appears to be close to finishing data collection, and report with recommendations for cleanup appears likely sometime toward the end of fall, 2017, she added.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached via email at countygvt@columbiabasinherald.com