Paving firms agree to pay pollution fines

Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2000 | 11:19 a.m.

Two Las Vegas area paving companies, Southern Nevada Paving Inc. and Las Vegas Paving Corp., have agreed to pay penalties totaling $185,500 and reduce pollution from their operations to settle two air pollution cases.

The two cases involve emissions of dust and diesel engine exhaust from the firms' two Clark County operations, two federal agencies announced Tuesday.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Justice said in their announcement that terms were included in consent decrees lodged in federal district court in Las Vegas. The government alleged separate violations of the federal Clean Air Act occurred from 1995 through 1997.

The announcement means the two agencies have settled at least three high-profile air pollution cases in the Las Vegas Valley within the last 30 days. The agencies announced Dec. 16 a $430,000 settlement with Titanium Metals Corp., known as Timet, for releasing sulfer dioxide gas at the company's Henderson plant. The gas, which can cause acid rain and health problems, was released from 1992 to 1998 as a byproduct of the company's titanium production plant in Henderson.

In all three cases, the federal government could have allowed the local regulatory agency, the Clark County Health District, to handle the violations. And in all three situations, the federal agencies went forward with independent prosecution despite local penalties being assigned by the health district.

David Schmidt, a spokesman for the EPA's regional offices in San Francisco, said the federal government can work in tandem with local agencies, ignore local violations of air quality rules in favor of local prosecution, or independently pursue action against offenders. Schmidt said he could not say why the federal agencies chose the third option.

David Howekamp, regional director of the EPA's air division, said his agency has been working closely with the Clark County Health District over the past year to improve the county's enforcement capacity.

Jennifer Sizemore, spokesman for the health district, said the federal agencies got involved in local prosecution of the alleged air quality violations after the health district had already started to take action.

Both companies are now in compliance with federal and local air quality rules, she said.

None of the three companies so far targeted by the federal government admitted violations in the consent decrees.

In the most recent action, Southern Nevada Paving paid a $103,000 civil penalty and agreed to take air pollution reduction measures to settle alleged violations of the federal Clean Air Act and Clark County's own smoke limits.

The company also was fined lesser amounts by the local health district, Sizemore said. Most of the violations were for work the company did in the Summerlin area or at the company's Sunrise Mountain pit, she said.

In 1997 the company was fined $28,500 for a combination of dust and permit violations, Sizemore said.

Sizemore said EPA inspectors and health district inspectors toured the Southern Nevada paving sites at the same time. The health district staff was focused more on dust violations rather than permit violations. The EPA focused more on the permit problems, Sizemore said.

The EPA and Justice Department said the company exceeded Clark County's limits on the thickness of dust clouds at one rock-crushing plant and violated the federal law's New Source Performance Standards for testing of new equipment at four other rock-crushing plants and one hot mix asphalt plant in the county. In addition to paying the penalty, the settlement requires the company, at an estimated cost of $650,000, to replace an older drum mixer type asphalt plant with a far cleaner, state-of-the-art double barrel drum mixer.

The new mixer will minimize dust, smog-forming volatile organic compounds and "blue smoke," a visible emission at older asphalt plants, the federal agencies said.

Representatives of Southern Nevada Paving were not available for comment.

Las Vegas Paving Corp. agreed to pay an $82,500 penalty and reduce its air emissions to settle alleged Clean Air Act violations at its Lone Mountain and Apex rock crushing and asphalt batch processing plants.

The company installed and operated five new diesel engines at its Lone Mountain facility in violation of Clark County's clean air plan. At the Apex site, the company installed and operated a nonmetallic mineral processing and hot mix asphalt facility without complying with federal air pollution rules requiring notification and emissions testing of the new equipment.

The settlement requires the company to retrofit one diesel engine with timing retardation that reduces air pollution, and to obtain proper permits from the Clark County Health District for all other engines.

Sizemore said Las Vegas Paving was fined about $8,200 over a three-year period by the local health district, beginning in 1995.

"We have not admitted any wrongdoing," Dave Breault, an environmental engineer for the company, said. Breault said the company entered into the consent decree to end three years of negotiations with the federal agencies.

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