BS Ranch’s alleged soil manufacturing plant on the outskirts of Lakeland may finally have reached a point of reckoning.
In July the Florida Department of Environmental Protection issued a draft consent order that amounted to an operating permit extension.
Polk County officials challenged FEDP’s action because they claimed it allowed violations of state environmental regulations to continue and asked for an administrative hearing.
There will be no hearing because FEDP officials decided on Oct. 3 to withdraw and void the proposed consent order, concluding that ” BS Ranch will be unable to perform CO 22-0423 and that it is not an appropriate exercise of enforcement discretion, and it should not be approved as final agency action. ”
Meanwhile, BS Ranch does have an active request before the department for a permit renewal and that has to be acted upon at some point. Additionally all of the parties involved have legal rights to appeal any decisions state officials make.
As predicted in an earlier post, this drama could drag on for some time.
Polk’s request for an injunction, which was filed Sept. 22 in Circuit Court in Bartow, seeks to halt BS Ranch from accepting any more waste until it comes up with a plan to market the ,more than 1 million tons of waste it has already received or remove the waste from its property.
Polk’s injunction makes it clear that BS Ranch was permitted as a recycling facility, not a landfill and wants to seek the court’s approval to enforce its development regulations.
It is worth noting again that if Polk’s land development staff had been more thorough in their review a decade ago when this operation first came to their attention, this whole mess would have been avoided.
There really is an important distinction between being customer friendly and simply being a pushover.
It is never clear whether that lesson has been learned down in Bartow.