$895,500 fine proposed for City of Los Angeles

By Gary Meyer and Patric Hedlund

In December of 2013 something smelled bad in Lebec. Nikki Albertson said she sometimes caught a whiff of something unpleasant while driving from her home in Frazier Park to her job at a tow company near Interstate 5. A worker at a cement plant near the former gravel mines said he had to hold his breath when he drove through to get to work.

The Mountain Enterprise began investigating a tip from Lebec resident Larry Skiba. Big-rig trucks, painted gold, were seen dumping waste at the B&B Materials site—and it smelled foul.

During the following week, this newspaper monitored the site about a mile west of I-5, and just a half mile across the Kern County line from L.A. County. The pattern was clear: Gold trucks arrived, dumped tons of brown, decaying material and left. Then white trucks arrived. Those drivers used a loader to transfer the stuff into the white trucks, then drove away. The intriguing part was this: The orange trucks that were dumping the materials bore the seal of the City of Los Angeles with the word “Sanitation” beneath it.

Tracking the shipments

Two Mountain Enterprise reporters separately followed two of the privately operated trucks after they picked up the materials from the Lebec…

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Photo captions:

Above: Steaming piles of waste left by City of Los Angeles for pickup by a private contractor

Right: A City of Los Angeles Bureau of Sanitation truck leaves the Lebec site after dumping waste in December 2013.

Above: The white private fleet trucks come into the transshipment yard and (above right) the driver uses a loader to fill the big-rig with the steaming material.

Below: In separate cars, reporters followed two different trucks from Lebec to Synagro, east of Taft; then a reporter went into the facility to talk with the manager, who explained they were taking in green waste from the trucks to turn into clean compost for farming. He said there was no sludge (dried sewage) in the shipments.

The August 18 notice delivered to City of Los Angeles

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This is part of the September 5, 2014 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.

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