(STORY BASED ON INFORMATION FROM DOLCEFINO CONSULTING AND LOCAL SOURCES)
In sworn testimony in Austin on March 12, 2019, C.Y. Benavides, the owner of the proposed Rancho Viejo/Pescadito Environmental Resource Center landfill — 20 miles east of Laredo between U.S. Hwy. 59 and State Hwy. 359 — detailed his relationship with coal ash polluter Green Group.
In advance of a July hearing before the State Office of Administrative Hearings (SOAH), Benavides was deposed by attorneys fighting the planned dump. He confirmed a deal was cut with Green Group in June of 2012 in which Rancho Viejo Ventures, LLC would have had Green Group putting a million dollars into the planned dump in exchange for 55 percent of the project.
Green Group has been sued by residents of Uniontown, Alabama who claimed coal ash contamination from the Arrowhead Landfill was making them sick and destroying their land.
Benavides’ deposition, which was obtained by Dolcefino Consulting of Houston, shows Benavides went into business with Green Group without basic research about their legal troubles with coal ash.
Benavides did not say that the Pescadito dump would prohibit toxic superfund waste like the Kingston, Tennessee environmental disaster of 1.1 billion gallons of fly ash coal slurry from coming to the prime ranchland near Laredo.
“We’re getting way ahead of where we are at with coal ash. I’m just saying that our permit allows me to take all kinds of different waste streams,” Benavides testified.
The formal agreement with Green Group has now ended as the landfill fight has dragged on, but Benavides testified the company is still in informal communication with his family. Dolcefino Consulting spotted a Green Group consultant, Alfonso Sifuentes, at a July 2018 Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) meeting in Laredo regarding the Pescadito facility.
“Can you commit to not working with Green Group at this landfill in the future?” Benavides was asked.
“Sure,” he replied.
Landfill opponent Pamela Jordan said the Green Group revelations confirm fears of the type of waste that could contaminate the area. “We should all be concerned about rail shipments of coal ash, which causes cancer. What will it do to the residents of the colonias just miles from the Pescadito site, and what will it do to the river? I am not sure the Green Group was ever really out of the picture. I don’t believe it,” said Jordan.
The TCEQ rejected Green Group’s planned 17-story-high dump in Hempstead, Texas after opponents proved their engineering was so flawed that digging the dump would have contaminated the water table.
A legal fight is underway to stop the planned Green Group dump in Caldwell County.
The City of Laredo and Webb County Commissioners are both against the project, and FEMA is looking at flood plain maps because of major concerns that flooding could further pollute the Río Grande.
The outcome of the upcoming July SOAH hearing over the Pescadito dump will go to the TCEQ, an agency known to ignore local political will, and which is sometimes regarded as a business development tool for polluters.
Dolcefino Consulting has been investigating Green Group for nearly four years and details the company’s political and legal fights on a website called www.exposegreengroup.com. According to Wayne Dolcefino, president of Dolcefino Consulting, the Pescadito fight will soon be added to his investigative website (dolcefino.com) for Laredo residents to track.
“Green Group has a scary record in Texas already, but what may more frightening is that Benavides wants a permit to bring dangerous waste to Laredo, and people don’t even know who is going to run the place,” Dolcefino said.
“The TCEQ currently doesn’t require you to identify the people who will handle this waste before they grant you a permit. The TCEQ has caught Green Group engineers destroying test records red-handed in the past, so they should be barred from any dump in this state. Their involvement in Laredo means we are now engaged in a thorough investigation of Pescadito and the threat it poses to Laredo,” Dolcefino concluded.
(Click here to read the full deposition)
