ANDERSON TOWNSHIP, Ohio — Evans Landscaping owner Doug Evans is back in court, this time fighting with state prosecutors over how to clean up buried construction waste at a site near Newtown.
Health officials say the 8361 Broadwell Road facility is an illegal landfill,where thousands of truckloads of construction waste are buried.
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost sued Evans in 2021 after more than 20 years of environmental violations. Evans agreed to pay a $550,000 fine and clean up three sites near Newtown as part of a settlement.
A year later, prosecutors say very little waste has been removed.
Now Evans wants to change the settlement terms, because he says health officials have repeatedly rejected his proposed cleanup plans and are acting unreasonably.
Both sides were at Hamilton County Court of Common Pleas this week, asking visiting Judge Jonathan Hein to break their impasse.
“This is an agreement. This is not an enforcement order … it was a compromise,” Evans lawyer Andrew Kolesar said in court on Wednesday. “Evans paid a penalty, a punishment, and he agreed to address the alleged violations. He didn’t agree to give state the ability to impose an unreasonable, unlawful, inefficient removal plan.”
Hein held two court hearings in recent weeks, and visited the site with both attorneys to get a firsthand view of how the waste was being dug up and disposed of.
The site is adjacent to the Little Miami River, with a sole-source aquifer beneath that provides drinking water to more than 1 million people.
“This was a former gravel pit and the sand and gravels were removed and … waste was placed in,” Chuck DeJonckheer, Hamilton County Public Health director of waste management testified. “There’s a high potential for impact from leachate flowing through there naturally and picking up contaminants and carrying them offsite, potentially to the Little Miami River as well.”
Test pits dug on five acres of the Broadwell site show that some waste is buried 25 feet deep, which puts it in contact with the water table, DeJonckheer testified.
Evans insists that health officials are demanding an unnecessary cleanup that could cost him more than $600,000 to haul what he considers to be clean fill, and not illegal construction debris, to a landfill.
The dispute centers around the definition of illegal waste, and what to do with it once it’s dug up from where it's been buried for years.
The consent order mandates it be placed in containers and immediately transported to a landfill. Health officials say once the material is unearthed, it quickly becomes impossible to distinguish between clay and soil, and pieces of pressure treated wood, drywall or lead paint.
But Evans said it is more efficient to stockpile the material on site, so workers can screen out clean material for reburial, instead of paying to take it all to a landfill.
He maintains that some debris, such as large chunks of concrete, should be considered clean hard fill and reburied. Workers have been sorting through the debris, once it is dug up, while health officials oversee it.
“We’ve been there nearly daily. We want a site presence, we want to make sure that its done right," DeJonckheer testified. “It’s tying up one approaching, one and half (county employees), full time.”
Experts on both sides testified with competing views on the cleanup.
Ralph Hirshberg, principal Civil & Environmental Consultants in Cincinnati, testified that the site owner should be the one to determine the most technically efficient and cost efficient means of removing the material in question.
“In my experience, removal under these circumstances is a bit unusual,” Hirshberg said about the construction waste buried at Broadwell. “Removal action is most often and typically dedicated to those sites in which waste is buried which represents an imminent endangerment to human health and the environment.”
Assistant state prosecutor Allen Vender argued that Evans can’t be trusted to oversee his own cleanup plan.
“There is a history of illegally buried waste, and in many cases, lying to the health district about it,” Vender said. “It’s gone on for years.”
Hein would not allow Vender to bring up Evans’ past because he said it is irrelevant to his decision about what a clean up plan should be.
This is the latest in a string of legal troubles for Evans, 61, a well-known entrepreneur on the East Side who built a landscaping empire from a high school job hauling mulch from a pickup truck.
Evans was released from federal prison in December 2021 after serving six months for a minority contracting fraud conviction, followed by several months of house arrest.
In 2014, Evans agreed to pay $300,000 in fines to settle a complaint with the Ohio EPA over air pollution violations. He also agreed to a $100,000 tree-planting project to serve as a natural windbreak for dust and emissions from his stonework, gravel and sand operations in Hamilton and Clermont counties.
