You can’t make a dump anywhere you’d like, a Clermont County judge says.
Married couple Donald and Anita Combs were ordered to pay $1.5 million in civil penalties after a Clermont County Common Pleas Court judge ruled that they had been illegally dumping significant amounts of solid waste near their home while doing business as Ace Dumpsters and Combs Trucking and Land Improvements.
Ohio law prohibits open burning and dumping.
In February, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost filed an eight-count complaint against the Milford couple, which a judge upheld in March, a news release from the AG says.
“Hauling trash to anywhere but the landfill is a rotten business, so we dumped some justice on this polluter,” Yost puns in the release.
The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Clermont County Public Health referred the case to the AG after numerous complaints about the Combs’ property. The judge found the investigation’s evidence “extraordinary.” According to the news release:
The EES [Environmental Enforcement Section] proved that Donald Combs for years covered acres of land near his home and commercial properties with tens of thousands of pounds of construction debris, solid waste, trash and scrap tires. An Ohio EPA inspector testified that some of the piles were over 20 feet high and that cleanup costs for the sites approach nearly $1.3 million.
Goshen Township Fire Department Chief Steve Pegram testified that the fire department had been to Combs’ property numerous times and that the site was a fire hazard, the release says.
Donald Combs apparently is a serial dumper. According to a previous news release, a judge had banned him from doing business in the waste industry as far back as 2016 because of illegal dumping. After a site Combs had been dumping at erected barricades, he began depositing debris on his own properties.
Combs frequently offered his dumping services on Craigslist, undercutting legitimate waste haulers who charged more because they were paying proper environmental disposal fees. “Combs hauled everything from household trash to environmentally hazardous materials such as oil and paint,” the release says.
This article appears in Apr 1-30, 2021.