Unusual Allies Fight Waste Incinerator : Hazards: Grower and farm workers, fearing pollution and health problems, oppose plan to put state’s first such commercial plant in Kings County.

Marylou Mares and Joe Maya are unlikely political allies. Mares is a farm worker who spends up to 10 hours a day in the fields transplanting tomatoes and chopping lettuce. Maya is a grower, a prominent businessman and political leader in the southern San Joaquin Valley.

They work together now because, despite their differences, both oppose a commercial toxic waste incinerator proposed for Kettleman City. The facility would be the first of its kind in California.

Maya, who farms 2,700 acres of lettuce, tomatoes and melons near Kettleman City, fears that the incinerator would pollute his crops. Mares and other residents--mostly Latino farm workers who speak little English--fear that the incinerator could cause health problems and endanger their jobs by forcing growers such as Maya out of the area.

Mares and Maya formed an organization to oppose the facility. They are fighting the project in court after suffering a setback last month when the Kings County Board of Supervisors approved the incinerator. A lawsuit was filed earlier this month contending that locating the incinerator near the largely Latino community is an example of “environmental racism.” The suit accuses Chemical Waste Management Inc. of making a pattern of singling out poor, minority communities as incinerator sites.

The suit is the first case in the nation to allege civil rights violations in an attempt to block a toxic incinerator, said Luke Cole, a staff lawyer for California Rural Legal Assistance, which represents the residents.

The 1,100 residents of Kettleman City are accustomed to living surrounded by toxic wastes. The firm proposing the incinerator operates California’s only full-service toxic waste landfill, four miles from Kettleman City.

“They figure they can dump all this toxic material on us because we’re just a bunch of migrants and farm workers,” Mares said. “If this town was filled with wealthy white people, they wouldn’t be doing this.”

Sylvia Vickers, spokeswoman for Chemical Waste, argued that the location of the company’s facilities is based on “environmental, not social, factors,” and that the race and income of residents is irrelevant.

The residents’ lawsuit also charges the Board of Supervisors with “unnecessarily” rushing the vote on the incinerator issue. Four days before two new supervisors were scheduled to take office, one of the supervisors who had been voted out of office, Les Brown, marshaled a vote on the incinerator without holding a public hearing.

If Brown had not “pushed for the early vote,” the issue would have been considered by the new board, which probably would have turned it down, said Supervisor Abel Meirelles, who opposed the project in a 3-1 vote.

Brown, now a lobbyist in Sacramento, said in a recent interview with The Times that he plans to specialize in toxic issues and did not rule out representing Chemical Waste. He said would wait one year so people do not have the impression that “I’m trying to do something underhanded.”

“The way this incinerator got through our Board of Supervisors definitely stinks,” Meirelles said. “I can’t put it any plainer. Because the vote was so fast, none of us had a chance to adequately prepare and study the issue.”

Kettleman City is a dusty speck of a town, just off Interstate 5 between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The small, battered houses and farm worker apartments are surrounded by vast stretches of row crops, fruit trees and almond orchards.

The community is 85% Latino and many residents speak no English. Placing an incinerator in a minority community such as Kettleman City is “part of a broader pattern of discriminatory siting” by Chemical Waste, the lawsuit charges. Chemical Waste’s other incinerators are in a Chicago neighborhood that is 72% black and 11% Latino; in Sauget, Ill., which is 73% black; and in Port Arthur, Tex., which is almost 50% black and Latino.

Chemical Waste is not the only firm that places facilities in minority neighborhoods, critics say. Another firm proposed building a toxic waste incinerator in Vernon, a few miles from downtown Los Angeles, near a largely Latino neighborhood. There was tremendous community opposition, and the project is stalled because of a lawsuit filed on behalf of the residents.

The reason the company placed its landfill in Kettleman City, said Vickers of Chemical Waste, is because of the area’s geological features. Because the nearby landfill handles toxic waste, Vickers said, it is an ideal spot for an incinerator, which is years from completion because it has to be approved by a number of governmental agencies.

About three years ago, Chemical Waste proposed building the incinerator, which could burn up to 100,000 tons a year of discarded pesticides, dry-cleaning chemicals, oil wastes, solvents, paint sludges and other toxic wastes. The facility also would produce tons of toxic ash, which would be contained and disposed of at the installation’s landfill.

Officials at the state Department of Health Services consider incinerators “a safe and viable way of destroying certain kinds of toxic waste,” said Bob Borzelleri, spokesman for the state’s toxic substances control program. He said California needs an incinerator because federal law requires that some types of toxic materials be burned.

At the site near Kettleman City, company officials said, at least 99.99% of all toxic materials will be disposed of by the incinerator and not released into the environment. Bradley Angel, toxic waste coordinator for the environmental organization Greenpeace, said the small amount of toxins released into the environment could “accumulate and end up in the water, soil and eventually the food chain.”

“The same government and business officials who once said toxic landfills were perfectly safe, and now acknowledge that many are leaking . . . are the same people who say incinerators are perfectly safe,” Angel said. “We didn’t believe them about landfills and we don’t believe them about incinerators.”

Kettleman City residents are fearful that the toxins from the incinerator could damage crops in the area. Residents acknowledge that California might need an incinerator, but they say the worst place to put one is in the middle of some of the richest agricultural land in the state.

Residents throughout the San Joaquin Valley, where the air quality continues to deteriorate because of growth, also have expressed concern. The Fresno and Visalia city councils voted to oppose construction of the facility.

On a recent afternoon, Maya stood beside a cantaloupe field he is irrigating to prepare for spring planting and pointed in the distance.

“The incinerator will be just three miles from here,” Maya said over the din of a thrumming booster pump. “If just one cantaloupe is contaminated, I won’t be able to sell any of them. I’ll lose the whole crop. . . . And I’ve got over $100,000 in this field.”

It is not just the farmers and farm workers who should be concerned about toxic residue, he said. The California Aqueduct, which transports drinking water to much of Southern California, is within five miles of the incinerator site.

Vickers said the amount of toxic materials released into the environment is “minuscule. . . . There’s no way that could be harmful.”

Residents are skeptical about the company’s assurances because of its record of safety violations.

Last year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency fined Chemical Waste $3.75 million for violations, including disconnecting air pollution monitors at its Chicago incinerator.

At the company’s landfill near Kettleman City, the EPA fined Chemical Waste $2.1 million in 1985 for violations that included operating additional landfills and waste ponds without authorization.

Residents also have been highly critical of Kings County officials. The lawsuit charges that Spanish-language materials and interpreters were not made available to residents during the environmental review process. More than 3,000 pages of environmental impact reports were published, but only eight pages were translated into Spanish.

In addition, residents said, many key meetings were held during the day, when they were working in the fields, and evening hearings were held in Hanford, about 40 miles from Kettleman City. Although the county Planning Commission held a public hearing on the issue, the Board of Supervisors, which issued a conditional use permit for the incinerator, refused to hold a public hearing before its vote. Filing a lawsuit, residents say, was their way of making their feelings known to the board.

Even if the lawsuit fails, the facility has to be approved by a review board appointed by the governor, and requires permits from state and federal environmental agencies and the county’s air pollution control district.

“A lot of times, people who oppose toxic waste facilities say: ‘Not in my back yard,’ ” said Cole. “But Kettleman City residents aren’t saying that. They already have a landfill where toxins are buried in the ground. They don’t want a second landfill that releases toxins in the air, too.”