South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.) (pg. 10B), October 7, 2006

CITY, STATE SETTLE LANDFILL SUIT

Neighboring Cleanup Costs Were Disputed

By Brittany Wallman, Staff Writer

A lawsuit that had been filed against Fort Lauderdale by the state has been settled, closing another chapter in the long-running Wingate Superfund saga.

The city will pay $200,000 to the state Department of Environmental Protection, as partial reimbursement for scraping dirt off yards neighboring the Wingate landfill in northwest Fort Lauderdale.The state had demanded the cleanup but did the work in 2002 after the city refused.

The state then sued Fort Lauderdale to pay the bill, about $1.2 million, City Attorney Harry Stewart said.

Stewart reminded city commissioners in a memo Sept. 21 that he thought the city could have won the case because the dioxin on the yards was below the federal requirement that was applied to the Wingate site. Still, he stated that settling for $200,000 would be cheaper.

City commissioners had discussed the proposed settlement in a private session Sept. 6. The state accepted the settlement Sept. 20 and will dismiss its case.

Wingate, the city's former landfill and incinerator off Northwest 31st Avenue/Martin Luther King Boulevard, has been the subject of years of litigation and public concern. The site, in a predominantly black community, was used by the city from 1954 to 1978. Later, the land was found to have been contaminated by cancer-causing toxins and was capped in a Superfund cleanup effort that concluded in 2002.

The city refused to clean the 17 yards near Wingate, arguing that the state's threshold for cancer-causing dioxin was unreasonably low, at 7 parts per trillion. The federal government's standard, applied at Wingate, was 600 parts per trillion, Stewart told commissioners in his memo.

"While the health of our citizens is paramount," then-City Manager Floyd Johnson wrote to the state DEP on Jan. 10, 2002, "the city cannot needlessly expend additional cleanup funds."

Two other suits against the city arising from the Wingate site are pending, Stewart said.

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