Anchorage Daily News

PALMER -- Several tons of manure and other compostable materials will be on the move for a second time this week as Evergreen Landscaping owner Jeff Dinwiddie tries to find a suitable home for his smelly waste.

More than 40 dump truck loads of manure and grass clippings were hauled Tuesday to a pit in Palmer owned by Alaska Demolition that accepts building demolition waste.

But Palmer city planning and code compliance technician Dawn Webster on Wednesday said manure couldn't stay.

The Palmer pit accepts building waste at its landfill near the Alaska State Fairgrounds. Manure and other waste that can become smelly is not permitted, Webster said.

Alaska Demolition employees were apparently unaware the so-called compost was mainly made up of what comes out the back end of a horse, she said.

"He told them what it was -- just not all of what it was," Webster said.

Dinwiddie on Wednesday afternoon said the manure would be trucked today to Susitna Organics, a composting facility on farmland in Point MacKenzie. He said an employee arranged for the material to be trucked to Alaska Demolition and there was "obviously a breakdown in communication" about what, exactly, was being hauled.

It will be the third time Dinwiddie has had to truck the manure around in just over two months.

Dinwiddie said he's "trying to make the best of a bad situation," but that the so-called compost has been a headache for what has otherwise been a community-minded business.

"We're just trying to be green -- and in this case, being green is costing us a lot of green," Dinwiddie said.

Evergreen in 2007 won an award from the Anchorage Chamber of Commerce for developing a community garden in Mountain View, a project Dinwiddie said the company still works on.

The waste was originally trucked in from Anchorage, where Dinwiddie last year opened a composting site near Huffman Road after the Point Woronzof composting facility was closed.

Anchorage horse owners and landscapers were glad for the site but neighbors complained of the stench, which Dinwiddie said was worst when he turned the piles twice a month. City officials told him to get rid of the odor by late October.

Trucks with dumping trailers hauled more than 30 loads of the smelly waste to the former potato field Dinwiddie leases at the busy intersection of Trunk Road and Palmer-Wasilla Highway near the end of October. Cook Inlet Region Inc., the Anchorage regional Native corporation, leases that land to Dinwiddie on a month-to-month basis.

But residents and business patrons there didn't like the smell either and complained to the Matanuska-Susitna Borough. In November, Dinwiddie got slapped with two violations. One was for the manure, which borough code compliance officer Kendra Johnson said constitutes a public health hazard, and the second was for running a commercial business on formerly agricultural land without a proper permit.

Dinwiddie challenged the violations but failed to show up at a Palmer District Court hearing in December, so the judge upheld the borough's claims and fined him $670 for the two infractions.

Dinwiddie said he was out of state at the time of the hearing and thought it had been delayed until after December. He had planned to argue that the compost doesn't fit the "junk and trash" law he was told he violated. Junk and trash is defined as no-longer usable material, he said. Compost is reusable, he said.

Johnson said Dinwiddie wouldn't be assessed the $500 per-day fine he could have faced for waiting two weeks to move the manure. He was working with the borough and trying to find a spot for it, she said.

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Dinwiddie said he never intended to cause problems in Mat-Su. He hauled the manure and yard waste to the Trunk Road potato field to enrich the soil in preparation for planting a tree farm there, he said. He still plans to plant trees, but said he closed the retail store he set up there last year.

If composting material isn't welcome at Trunk Road, partnering with Susitna Organics could be an all-around bonus, he said. He's looking into the cost of trucking Anchorage horse manure there and, once composted, trucking it back to sell to gardeners at his Anchorage nursery.

Johnson hadn't heard Wednesday afternoon that the manure was headed to Point MacKenzie. She said she would have to check placing the piles there would disturb anyone before she could say if Dinwiddie's manure piles have found a permanent home.

Find Rindi White online at adn.com/contact/rwhite or call her in Wasilla at 907-352-6709.

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