By Neil Farrell
San Luis Obispo County will get a small piece of a $5.7 million pie from the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle) to “safely manage waste and used tires,” the agency announced recently. San Luis Obispo County was slated to receive some $60,000 of the over all grant, one of the lowest totals for this round of funding.
Among the largest recipients of the 36 who got grants, were the City of Fresno with $282,253; Fresno County at $300,000 and Los Angeles and Riverside counties at $600,000 each. As a comparison, Monterey County was granted some $71,000.
The monies come from CalRecycle’s “Local Government Waste Tire Enforcement Grant Program” which the State said, “ensures cities and counties have sufficient funding to enforce compliance for managing waste and used tires, including safe hauling and storage.”
Lead tire inspector, Denny Brewer of County Environmental Health Services, said the money reimburses the County for inspections of what’s called “waste tire generators and haulers,” under the State’s “Tire Program Identification” or TPID. Such businesses include “tire stores, auto repair shops, car/bike dealers, companies with trucking fleets of various kinds, etc,” said Brewer. “Anyone who generates 10 or more waste tires at a time is required to obtain a TPID number from CalRecycle. Those TPID’s have to be inspected to ensure they are disposing of the tires properly, maintaining documentation, using haulers that are also registered, storing tires safely, among other things.”
He added that the bulk of the money from the State goes to inspecting 150 registered TPIDs in SLO County. There is currently only one tire recycling facility, at Cold Canyon Landfill in rural Arroyo Grande, which Brewer said grinds up tires to bury the day’s garbage.
There are no true “tire dumps” or places with thousands even million of tires anywhere in the County. Perhaps the most infamous tire dump here was on property owned by former County Supervisor Ruth Brackett and her husband Jack, and operated by a man named Bud Steers.
Steers started “Bud’s Used Tires and Wheels & Tire Recycling” in 1985. By 1995 when the business closed, he had amassed an estimated 2 million old tires plus an auto recycling yard on the Brakett’s Sheridan Road property. He of course didn’t have permits for the tire pile.
Access was blocked to the tires for inspectors with the California Integrated Waste Management Board and the fire department, as well. The Bracketts butted heads with the State, were ostracized locally, and the massive tire pile spun into a major scandal of the day.
But it was eventually resolved and the tire dump removed. “We don’t have any more of the old tire dumps like the Brackett site,” Brewer said. “Anything like that was cleaned up in the first years of the tire grant program. We can and will respond to reports of illegal tire piles and dumping to ensure they are cleaned up, however, at this point, the tire grant program is more of a monitoring/maintenance operation to ensure Brackett type situations don’t occur again.”
“Illegally stockpiled or dumped waste tires are breeding habitats for disease-carrying mosquitoes and other vectors,” according to CalRecycle. “Waste tire piles can also catch fire and result in long-burning conflagrations that release toxic smoke into the air, water and soil.”
