Sewage sludge prompts outrage
Sod firm spreads waste on farmland as fertilizer
Palm Beach County fields once green with sod have turned into a sludge-covered disposal site that reeks like the inside of an over-loaded portable toilet.
Truckloads of leftover sewage sludge from Broward County are getting spread on western Palm Beach County farmland — turning a portion of the Everglades Agricultural Area into a destination for treated human waste.
The Dan Griffin Sod Company considers the sludge a welcome fertilizer to help boost its farming potential. But Palm Beach County officials say the property is now more like a dump site than agriculture.
“It was disgusting. You couldn’t bear the smell,” said County Code Enforcement Director Ramsay Bulkeley, who inspected the property after complaints of noxious odors. “It looked like I was walking on raw sewage.”
As much as 10,000 tons of sludge a year gets spread on the 317-acre property, according to the Palm Beach County Proper-
ty Appraiser’s office, which has sought to revoke the agricultural designation of the land and the tax breaks that come with it.
“There is absolutely no sod on the property. They are using the property to process sewage sludge,” said Diane Pendleton, agricultural department manager for the Property Appraiser’s Office. “It’s unbelievable and unconscionable to be dumping waste in the Everglades Agricultural Area.”
Environmental advocates warn that the dumping creates a contamination threat to the Everglades, where taxpayers already are spending billions of dollars to clean up water pollution.
“It’s a substance that should not be spread on fields ever,” said Earthjustice attorney David Guest, who has challenged sludge spreading elsewhere in Florida. “It’s inexcusable that [state regulators] would permit this.”
But state regulators counter that the spreading of this treated sewage sludge — from the Southern Regional Wastewater Treatment Plant in Hollywood — is allowed to be used as a fertilizer as long as pollution controls are followed.
For Dan Griffin, mixing in the cleaned-up sludge and mulched debris into his land is a way to restore soil worn away farming.
“You can use it as a fertilizer,” Griffin said. “It [is] good and safe for the environment.”
The Dan Griffin Sod Company property is located on Willard Smith Road just west of U.S. 27, about seven miles south of South Bay. Sugar cane planted along the edges of the property shields the sludge from view, but can’t block the smell.
The sewage sludge spread on the land is a wastewater plant byproduct leftover from cleaning up what gets flushed down toilets and sent to the wastewater plant in Hollywood. That plant also treats waste from Dania Beach, Hallandale Beach, Miramar, Pembroke Park and Pembroke Pines.
The sludge, also called biosolids, gets dried, treated and heated to kill off bacteria, viruses and other contaminants that pose a potential health or environmental risk, according to city spokeswoman Raelin Storey.
Hollywood treating the sludge to that degree qualifies the material as a fertilizer that can be spread wherever fertilizer is allowed, according to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.
“We feel that we have come up with a very environmentally responsible disposal plan,” Storey said. “The end product is essen-
by
decades
of tially a fertilizer.”
Lesser-treated sewage sludge is not allowed to be spread near Lake Okeechobee or other protected water bodies. Much of it ends up spread on land scattered from the Panhandle to Central Florida. Sludge from across the state is also disposed of in landfills.
The dumping on the remote Griffin property started in 2009, according to the Property Appraiser’s Office. It was an anonymous complaint in 2014 about “horrific site conditions” that triggered inspections by the Property Appraiser’s Office and county code enforcement.
Instead of sod, the Property Appraiser’s Office found trucks delivering mounds of sludge that gets spread out and dried. There was an “overwhelming strong fecal matter odor,” according to a report from the Property Appraiser’s Office.
Sugar cane has also been planted on portions of the property, but sludge processing has become the main use of the land, Pendleton said.
As a result, the Property Appraiser’s Office this year revoked the agricultural classification on Griffin’s property. That would boost the potential taxes owed on the land to nearly $50,000, instead of about $20,000 a year.
Also, while state law limits local regulations on farming operations, losing the agricultural designation could enable county code enforcement to require a clean-up of the property.
“Agricultural purposes does not include processing of farm products and certainly not sewer sludge,” according to the Property Appraiser’s Office report challenging Dan Griffin Sod Company’s agricultural designation.
Griffin challenged the property appraiser’s findings and an independent hearing officer sided with Griffin, restoring the agricultural designation for the land and the tax breaks that come with it.
The hearing officer found that the use of the land at Griffin Sod Company still qualifies under the state standard of “good faith commercial agricultural use.” Despite the shift away from sod and adding sludge, the planting and sale of sugar cane from the land shows an “intent to farm the remaining acreage,” according to the findings.
The Property Appraiser’s Office can appeal those findings, which could lead to a court challenge next year.
In addition to the tax fight over the sludge dumping, the environmental concern is that adding treated human waste to land in the Everglades Agricultural Area — the farming region south of Lake Okeechobee — is importing more potential pollution problems that could flow south to the Everglades.
When too much phosphorus from fertilizers and other pollutants washes into the Everglades, it fuels the growth of cattails that squeeze sawgrass out of Florida’s River of Grass.
Sewage sludge treated to kill virus, bacteria and other potential health threats is considered a Class AA biosolid and can be used on land for edible crops, according to the Department of Environmental Protection.
Griffin said decades of farming had worn his land “down to the rock” before he started adding the sludge. He said his plan has been to keep using it until his mucky soils are 3- to 4-feet deep again.
“It is all legal,” said.
Griffin
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