Chino Dairies Facing Fines Over Waste

A federal judge will begin fining five Chino dairies $500 a day if they don’t implement a pilot project to reduce air and water pollution from foul-smelling open wastewater lagoons within two weeks.

But a dairy representative said they are already at work designing a state-of-the-art wastewater lagoon, and accused environmental groups that sued the dairies of “just trying to make the headlines.”

U.S. District Court Judge Virginia A. Phillips of Riverside held the five dairies in contempt Thursday for failing to implement terms of a 2002 settlement after the Natural Resources Defense Council and Defend the Bay took legal action against them for violations of federal clean air and clean water laws.

The dairies did not admit wrongdoing, but agreed to implement environmental management plans. The environmentalists said the dairies also agreed to design and pay for a pilot program to cover a wastewater lagoon and monitor it for two years.

“The deadline was January 2004,” said David Beckmann, head of the NRDC’s Los Angeles-based Coastal Water Project, which sought the contempt of court order. “They were basically continually saying they were going to comply, but in the future. But the future never came.”

Dairy owner Glenn Gorzeman of Ontario, whose Gorzeman Family dairy and Gorzeman Dairy 2 were named in the order, said he had never agreed to cover a lagoon on his farm or to pay for it to be done elsewhere. The others named in the order, Desperado Dairy, Ben Vander Lean Dairy and L&M; Dairy, could not be reached for comment, nor could their attorney.

Gorzeman said he had heard nothing of the contempt order until he was contacted by a reporter.

Gorzeman, who has 2,200 cattle on 85 acres, said his lagoon and nearly all of the dairies in the Chino basin were dry this time of year anyway, and “a dairy hasn’t been selected yet [for the pilot program] because most of us want to get out of here. We’re selling the land and moving out.”

Dairies in the Chino basin comprise the nation’s largest concentration of milk cows, but their numbers are being reduced by large-scale suburban residential development.

The lagoons hold millions of gallons of bovine urine and feces, according to Bob Caustin, head of Defend the Bay, a Newport Beach-based group. He said that when the lagoons overflow or rainwater mixes with them, they flow into storm drains and flood channels that feed the Santa Ana River, polluting drinking water for Orange County and the Pacific Ocean.

Bob Feenstra, head of the Milk Producers Council in Chino, a dairy trade group, said the environmental groups knew the dairies were working with a Pasadena engineering firm on a lagoon, and never called them before going back to court.

“I’m upset. I’m really disappointed,” he said. “They’re just trying to make headlines at the expense of our dairy farmers.”