499 
Mr. Breaux. Well, are the people that you represent in your as- 
sociation in fact, making an effort to try and find alternative land 
based sites? You mentioned the difficulty in California of finding 
land-based sites where counties have adopted resolutions saying 
you can’t dump in our county, go somewhere else. 
Mr. Wuite. The answer, Mr. Chairman, is yes, they are trying 
-and the subanswer is, and it is murder. Nobody wants sludge to be 
put in their backyard or at least we have not found anybody who 
has been clamoring for it. 
The Orange County sanitation districts decided that a useful ar- 
rangement would be to compost their sludge and, indeed, they se- 
lected a site, had public hearings and 700 irate citizens showed up. 
The next morning the board of supervisors of Orange County 
issued an edict to the sewer agencies, no composting facilities here 
or anywhere else. 
Well that is an easy edict but still the sludge keeps coming out of 
that system and something has to be done with it. 
Happily, the Environmental Protection Agency, at long last, is 
beginning to focus on the whole of the sludge management prob- 
lem. Our agencies have been urging for a long time that all of 
these options be considered and indeed they are now beginning to 
do so. 
One further point that I think is evident, but let me make it 
clear for the record. Sludge is not necessarily sludge. There are all 
kinds of sludges. Some that are very toxic, obviously and cannot be 
handled the same as those that are not. 
For example, here in the Washington, D.C., area, because of the 
lack of industry, we have relatively toxic-free sludge. Our judgment 
is that EPA, NOAA, the State agencies and the local agencies plus 
the scientific community have an obligation to find out the impacts 
of different types of sludge. 
Our agencies are now busily engaged in doing what I think is the 
right thing, going back up the chain. They have a pretreatment 
program which very, very effectively eliminates many or most of 
the toxic materials, especially heavy metals through recycling or 
simply closing some facility down. 
That is, in our judgment, a far better approach and happily is 
one that is being worked on by the individual agencies. 
Mr. BreAvx. Mr. Forsythe. 
Mr. ForsyTHE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We thank you. 
With regard to the situation concerning these local agencies, I 
think you have described it very well. You have heard the testimo- 
ny from the port authorities dealing with another matter, the 
ocean dumping of dredge spoil and their attitude toward user fees. 
You have also said that the agencies which you represent would 
support sharing the monitoring and research costs. And, of course, 
Mayor Koch said this very clearly the other day. How do you con- 
ceive of this working—what kind of mechanism could provide for 
this shared operation? I am a little leary of saying voluntarily it 
will happen. Certainly I think there can be duplication of effort 
and wasted moneys if every unit involved starts doing a little bit 
on their own. 
How can we pull everyone together? 
