Pinal County lawmaker aims to curtail illegal dumping

With BC-CNS-Illegal Dumping-Box

Photo Available (thumbnail, caption below)

By SEAN MANGET
Cronkite News Service

PHOENIX (Tuesday, March 3) _ When Barbara McGuire was a child, she and her friends often built forts out of junk dumped illegally in the Pinal County desert.

On one occasion, she and her friends played hide-and-seek, and McGuire decided to hide in a refrigerator with holes shot through it. She was trapped about two hours.

“Thank goodness it was not the heat of summer, or I probably would not be standing here before you today,” McGuire, a Democratic representative from Kearny, told fellow lawmakers last week.

McGuire is sponsoring legislation that she said would more clearly put the responsibility for dumping on those who commit the crime. It would make dumpers liable for all charges associated with removal of garbage, in addition to a civil penalty of not less than $1,800.

The House Environment and Judiciary committees voted unanimously to endorse HB 2424, sending it to the floor by way of the Rules Committee.

McGuire said her story underscores the severity of a problem plaguing ranchers and farmers in rural Arizona. She said she sees the problem while riding horses near her home, as subcontractors for construction companies often dump debris on leased land rather than paying to put it in a landfill.

“It happens over and over and over,” she said.

Under McGuire’s bill, investigators would determine the identity of the dumper by combing through the garbage for bills, business cards and other identifying documents left on the trash. The person implicated by these documents would be required to prove that he or she did not dump the garbage or prove with receipts that it has been disposed of legally.

William Dunn, a rancher who serves as a representative for the Winkelman Natural Resource Conservation District, said McGuire’s bill is needed because many dumpers are able to get away with it because the burden of proof rests too heavily on the shoulders of environmental investigators and criminal prosecutors.

“That gives law enforcement its teeth,” he said.

Under McGuire’s bill, if the identity of an illegal dumper can’t be determined a landowner would still be responsible for disposing of the garbage but would be allowed an appeals process to prove he or she isn’t responsible for the dumping and should be exempt from civil penalties.

Pinal County, which lies within McGuire’s district, is especially prone to illegal dumping because of its abundance of open spaces, said Heather Murphy, a spokeswoman for the county’s Environmental Health Department.

“In rural areas where you find fewer residences and nobody watching them, unfortunately we do see dumping,” she said.

Despite the concerns of McGuire and her supporters, reported incidents of dumping in Pinal County have actually been going down in recent years, said Joe Pyritz, a Pinal County spokesman. County environmental investigators opened 167 cases in 2007, down from 231 in 2005, he said.

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CAPTION FOR BC-CNS-ILLEGAL DUMPING: Tires and a sofa sully at patch of desert in far north Phoenix in 2008. As counties around Arizona battle illegal dumping, Rep. Barbara McGuire, D-Kearney, is pushing for a law to toughen penalties and increase accountability for those responsible for disposing of garbage. (Cronkite News Service Photo/Grayson Steinberg)