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Composter Must Clean It Up or Shut It Down in Lyman, Judge Says

June 18, 2008 - LYMAN -- A judge has ordered the maker of a popular garden compost to comply with environmental regulations or stop operating.

Winterwood Farm of Lyman was found to be in contempt by Maine District Court Judge Andre Janelle for violating terms of a 2007 legal settlement intended to keep polluted storm runoff from fouling a nearby stream known as Lords Brook. Janelle’s May 27 order requires the company to immediately cease unlicensed discharges, meet new deadlines for overdue license applications and allow state regulators onto the property for inspections.

Winterwood Farm is one of the state’s largest agricultural composters. It takes in farm and food waste from around the region and turns it into a soil additive used by gardeners and landscapers. Although valued by state agencies on one hand for recycling organic wastes, Winterwood Farm has been in a two-year-long dispute with the Maine Department of Environmental Protection and some of the company’s neighbors over the discharge of polluted storm water. Nutrients flushed off the site after rainstorms since October 2005 have caused a bloom of sticky, white fungus for more than a mile downstream, according to the state.

Maine’s DEP has argued that the company is in violation because it has outgrown its capacity to contain storm runoff.

The company, meanwhile, has accused DEP of being too quick to take enforcement action.

Assistant Attorney General Mark Randlett, who represents the DEP, said the contempt finding clearly found that the company and its owner, Robert St. Onge, violated the previous court order by failing to work with the state agency.

“This sets out a compliance schedule which, if he fails to meet it, does result in an order to stop taking waste and stop operating the facility,” Randlett said.

Randlett said the DEP has given the company time to fix the problems and does not want to force it to shut down. “They’ve been trying to work with him for a quite a long time. It got to this point because they didn’t get the cooperation they needed,” he said. “They’ve got to get him into compliance with the law.”

Winterwood’s attorney, William Kany, said the company is working to meet the court’s new schedule. It has already filed a new discharge license application to use storm water for spray irrigation, he said, and surveyors and engineers are working on other applications and improvement plans that are due this summer.

The company has been seeking federal grant money to upgrade its ability to contain storm water.

Representatives have said the state’s court action was delaying that work.

Winterwood Farm also is in the midst of a financial reorganization in bankruptcy court. The bankruptcy filing was not caused by the state’s enforcement action, Kany said. But, he said, “if these things (in the contempt order) don’t get done, there isn’t going to be a facility to raise the money to pay the creditors.”

Kany said Winterwood Farm serves 130 farms throughout southern Maine and provides a place for supermarkets, food manufacturers and others businesses to recycle their wastes.

“Where is that waste stream going to go if this facility isn’t here? No one has really looked at that issue,” he said. “We’re hoping that’s not going to happen.”

By JOHN RICHARDSON, Staff Writer, Portland Press Herald, June 11, 2008.


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Regions: Sanford


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