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b"As the County prepares to hire a contractor to repair the 25-year-old cap on the Laytonville landfill, old questions about contaminants are rising to the surface. \\n\\n\\nA 2020 report found that one of the groundwater wells had detected contamination that triggered extra reporting requirements and a study about how to take corrective action. The landfill is monitored by a network of ten wells, plus gas probes and devices that monitor the depth and pressure of the groundwater. In the first half of 2020, the well on the southeast corner of the site showed increased levels of several elements, including iron, manganese, chloride, calcium, sodium, sulfate and arsenic. \\n\\nAfter the reports about the anomalies in the well, the Cahto Tribe, whose rancheria borders the closed dumpsite, initiated government-to-government consultations with the California Environmental Protection Agency, and the county signed an agreement with the tribe about how to conduct the repairs on the cap with tribal input and keep their consultant, Dr. Deitrick McGinnis, apprised of work on the landfill. \\n\\nMcGinnis says two of the three wells he\\u2019s working with have shown signs of contamination he suspects are from the historic garbage. He wants to put in a half-dozen more wells to collect more data.\\n\\n\\u201cThis is not an inexpensive endeavor,\\u201d McGinnis acknowledged. \\u201cI think that we\\u2019re going to see, at least on this side of things, at least another million dollars spent before we have a good handle on it. Expanding the system could double that price. And then cleaning up landfills, if you get lucky and it isn\\u2019t much of a problem, you know, it can only be seven figures. If it goes the other way, you just start putting zeros behind things.\\u201d He hastened to add that the project is \\u201cvery much in the assessment phase right now, so I hate to scare anybody. But it's not ten thousand dollars.\\u201d He thinks he could spend half a million dollars on a first phase groundwater assessment, and another half million for soil analysis.\\n\\nMcGinnis said the work has been funded so far mainly by federal grants specific to the Tribe, which has leveraged the funds for more grants from the EPA, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Bureau of Reclamation. The Tribe has also received Environmental Justice funding from the State of California, \\u201cwhich I think speaks loudly to what this problem really means,\\u201d McGinnis concluded.\\n\\nA 2016 report by an Alaska-based firm called Ahtna found soil contaminants that Sandy Karinen, a retired state environmental scientist, thinks merit another look.\\n\\n\\u201cThey found hex-chrome, they found arsenic at exceedingly high levels. Arsenic here has been very high, and they found chloroform,\\u201d she said. \\u201cSo what this report said is, you\\u2019ve got to do a whole lot more sampling.\\u201d\\n\\nThe Rancheria is within the jurisdiction of the Laytonville County Water District, which treats its water to a high standard, according to District Manager Jim Shields.\\n\\n\\u201cThat water is perfectly safe to use for all purposes,\\u201d said Shields. \\u201cWe do thousands of tests a year. We do tests we don\\u2019t even have to do. We\\u2019re not even required by any of our regulatory agencies to test for PCB and hexavalent chromium. We do that on our own. We do tests, on a regular basis, for PCBs and chrome 6. I\\u2019ve done that from day one. Why do I do it when we don\\u2019t have to do it? I do it because I\\u2019m a responsible member of this community. I listen to people. If people have concerns over those issues, I\\u2019m going to do what I can to ensure and guarantee that there are not those sorts of contamination risks here. In fact, we just completed our annual PCB and chrome 6 tests. They're very expensive to do, and once again, it came up negative. Especially the test for PCBs. It\\u2019s a very broad scale kind of full-gamut test. Never, ever, ever have we ever found any of that in our water.\\u201d\\n\\n\\nShields says about 20 years ago, he worked with scientists from EPA Region 9 to test ten private wells near the old dump, and found microscopic levels of cattle dip and DDT, a pesticide used by loggers, but nothing he thinks could be attributed to the landfill. \\n\\n\\u201cWe continue to test private drinking wells,\\u201d he emphasized. \\u201cThey are the drinking wells that are immediately adjacent to the landfill. There\\u2019s an old well on the rez that\\u2019s no longer active. It hasn't been active on the rez since 1969, because they\\u2019ve been on city water since then. So these wells that we test, and we\\u2019re primarily testing them for PCBs and chrome 6, they are literally right next door to the landfill, downslope gradient, so that if there\\u2019s anything escaping or migrating off of that landfill, boy, most likely, you\\u2019re going to see that stuff in those wells.\\u201d\\n\\nShields is the longtime editor of the Laytonville Observer and says he kept close track of state and federal investigations into the illegal disposal of hexavalent chromium, or chrome 6, a highly toxic industrial contaminant. In 1996, the City of Willits sued Remco Hydraulics over the improper disposal of toxins used in its chrome-plating and manufacturing business. Shields says testimony by Remco workers and his own personal contacts convinced him that the pollutant was being illegally dumped \\u2014 just not in Laytonville.\\n\\n\\u201cTheir testimony was, no, we dumped all that stuff down here in Willits,\\u201d he recalled. \\u201cWhat my friend said, and it made sense, was, why would we load up chrome 6 and haul it 22 miles north to Laytonville? Why would we do that?\\u201d\\n\\nSupervisors John Haschak and Dan Gjerde, who represent Laytonville since post-census redistricting shifted parts of Bell Springs Road and Spyrock to the Fourth District, asked the state to review previous studies and conduct more testing, if it\\u2019s warranted. The water district signed on to the county\\u2019s request. \\n\\nYana Garcia, the Secretary for the California Environmental Protection Agency, wrote the supervisors a letter this month, saying that additional groundwater monitoring locations and an updated inspection plan are part of the landfill renovation that she expects will take about two years."