Waste-treatment law killed

TOOELE — It's been less than two years since the Tooele County Commission started requiring yearly independent audits of the waste treatment companies that pay annual mitigation fees to the county, but on Tuesday that law was unanimously repealed without any fanfare.

The commission opted out of committing to the audits because of the cost — each audit is estimated to have a $25,000 price tag — but one man says the commission is already missing millions of dollars that couldn't be found even in an independent audit.

According to county contractual agreements formed in the late 1980s, businesses that deal with hazardous, radioactive or municipal waste must pay mitigation fees to the county. EnergySolutions is the county's largest contributor of mitigation fees, but Charles Judd, former president of Envirocare, the predecessor of EnergySolutions, told the commission Tuesday that EnergySolutions might have shortchanged the county by about $15 million over the past six years.

Judd, who is involved in an ongoing lawsuit against Tooele County and EnergySolutions, says he has uncovered questionable information in his research that would not be detected by auditors unless they knew the ins and outs of the waste disposal industry.

"I've been close to these taxes and fees," Judd said. "There are volumes and volumes of information that you have to go through. There are thousands and thousands of pages that you have to go through, and we've gone through enough of them to know that there are some issues out there that ought to be looked at, and I don't think these auditors would have any idea how to do that."

Commissioner Bruce Clegg, who joined the commission after the annual audit law was added to the books in 2006, said he would take Judd's warning into consideration but maintained that yearly audits wouldn't be a prudent use of taxpayer money. The county can still do audits, independent or not, of the companies as often as they want.

"We just don't feel that it's a wise place to put our money because if there was ever a doubt or a question, we have the right to perform an immediate audit," Clegg said. "We're not nervous about it. (The businesses subject to mitigation fees have) been really good customers and clients and we've been glad to have them in the county and we're looking forward to doing more business with them in the future. We're not worried about it."

EnergySolutions spokesman Mark Walker said Judd's claim was "baseless" and not consistent with the audits that have been performed on the company.