Eliot Wessler lives in Whitefield and works with a number of grassroots organizations in New Hampshire’s North Country.

New Hampshire’s Department of Environmental Services (DES) has the responsibility to balance the interests of landfill developers and the public. But the agency, under the thumb of outgoing Gov. Sununu, has leaned heavily in favor of the solid waste industry for years, and the New Hampshire legislature has too often gone along.

DES’ new landfill siting rules were approved at the Dec. 19 JLCAR (Joint Legislative Committee on Administrative Rules) hearing. DES provided JLCAR with just enough half-truths that it was able to ram home a version of the rules that was heavily influenced by landfill developers.

The stink from that hearing hasn’t abated. The written testimony in advance of the hearing consisted of virtually unanimous objection from scientists and crickets from the industry. As for the hearing, the 15-20 people who showed up to provide testimony opposed to DES’ rules were denied an opportunity to testify by an administrative maneuver engineered by two of the ten JLCAR members.

Given everything we now know about the risks of PFAS contamination from landfills, including the contamination of public water supplies near Pease, the hundreds of incidents of leachate mismanagement at Casella’s NCES landfill in Bethlehem, and Casella’s hubris in trying to push through permit applications to build a brand new mega-landfill (the GSL project), it’s appalling that DES’ new rules make it easier for landfill developers to build landfills wherever they want.

The most egregious thing DES did was to weaken the hydraulic conductivity standard compared to its original proposal. The industry lobbied DES to make the change, arguing that the stronger standard would make siting landfills harder. DES caved, despite overwhelming evidence that the weaker standard dramatically increased the risk of landfill contamination, and with no countervailing evidence that a stronger standard would prevent siting new landfills.

So now we’re stuck. DES’ standard is far weaker than the standard used in both Maine and Vermont. Moreover, it is weaker than all U.S. states that have such standards, as well as many foreign countries, including countries with extremely lax environmental rules such as India.

DES is required by administrative rules, enforced by JLCAR, to make decisions on the merits of the available evidence. In weakening the conductivity standard, DES offered assertions to JLCAR but provided no evidence that the conductivity standard weakening was based on merit. In fact, the evidence presented to JLCAR seems to confirm that DES reverse-engineered the standard so that permits for Casella’s GSL project could be greenlighted:

■DES argued that the old rules did not have a hydraulic conductivity standard, so the new rules are ipso facto more protective. That defies logic given that the standard is set so low that it virtually provides a permission structure for landfills to be sited in highly permeable soil.

■DES disowned a DES-sponsored soil permeability map that showed some 85% of the state has more suitable soils for landfill siting than the GSL site. But having disowned the map, DES produced no data or evidence of any kind regarding the distribution of soil permeability in New Hampshire.

■In DES’s own words, “NHDES staff asked other concerned members of the regulated community to provide information and documents to demonstrate …foreclosing… the siting of any new landfill or the expansion of any existing landfill, but the department did not receive any supporting documentation.”

■On the same subject, in DES’ own words, “Other commenters including several industry representatives commented that the initial values…would make it very difficult to site new landfills or to expand the existing landfills in the state. One industry representative referenced a statewide study that had been conducted for a private client that they claim showed this result. The representative was unwilling to share the document.”

With JLCAR’s acceptance of DES’ Section 800 rules revisions, DES may have won a pyrrhic victory. Outgoing Gov. Sununu is just about the last public official to think GSL is a good idea, and he will be remembered by many as a cheerleader for unneeded large engineering projects, including the albatross that is the Seabrook nuclear plant, and the ill-conceived Northern Pass transmission project.

With the inauguration of Governor-elect Ayotte in a few weeks, DES will be under new management. She has said that under her watch New Hampshire will modernize its landfill management practices, will not become the solid waste dump for all of New England, and that the GSL project will not happen.

In addition, given the heightened awareness in the New Hampshire legislature of the dangers from landfills, as well as heightened awareness that DES historically has not done nearly enough to faithfully fulfill its mission to protect public health and welfare, there is hope that through new legislation and tougher oversight, DES will be encouraged (or maybe forced) to re-focus on its mission.