WA’s tire fee pays for ferries, not cleaning up Richland tire dump | Editorial

Richland’s massive tire dump on Twin Bridges Road is a disaster waiting to happen. More than two decades ago, state lawmakers pledged to make cleaning up such hazardous sites a priority. It is past time they deliver.

The Richland tire dump started with so much promise in 2000. It was going to be an environmental showcase that demonstrated new uses for rubber from old tires.

That never happened, and the tires piled up over years. Today the site is the largest tire dump in the state, weighing in at 7,100 tons. That is roughly 18 times the combined heft of the other 48 land-based tire heaps documented in a 2023 Washington Department of Ecology report.

In addition to being blights upon the landscape, tire dumps can leach toxic chemicals into soil and groundwater and serve as massive breeding grounds for West Nile Virus-bearing mosquitoes, as well as potentially disease-carrying rats.

The risk of fire, which would emit toxic pollutants, is also worrisome, as veterans of the “Mount Firestone” blaze in Everett in 1984 can attest. “It was as if Godzilla showed up in the backyard … but there’s nothing anybody can do about it. You just don’t go there,” a resident later recalled to the Daily Herald in Everett.

The city of Richland pushed for years to have the Twin Bridges site cleaned up. Unfortunately, corporate shell games and the departure of the previous owners have prevented holding anyone accountable.

In 2024, the city received permission from the courts to remediate the site, but the $1.1 million to $1.6 million price tag has proved prohibitively expensive.

The whole situation should serve as a cautionary tale for public agencies not to get swept up in the exuberance of businesses that come into town with big promises of jobs and tax revenue. The public relies on elected officials to ask tough questions like, “Is this a good idea?” and “If it fails, who will clean up the mess?” before endorsing a project.

As far back as 2002, former Port of Benton Commissioner Bob Larson, who died in December, warned that taxpayers could be on the hook if the Richland tire project failed. His concerns proved prescient, but too few listened at the time.

Theoretically, state funds should be available to remediate the site. Washington collects a fee on the sale of every tire to cover the cost of someday disposing of them properly.

When lawmakers first set a $1 fee per tire in 2005, they wrote, “The Legislature finds that discarded tires in unauthorized dump sites pose a health and safety risk to the public. Many of these tire piles have been in existence for a significant amount of time and are a continuing challenge to state and local officials responsible for cleaning up unauthorized dump sites and preventing further accumulation of waste tires.”

In 2009, when they made the fee permanent, lawmakers committed to “fully clean up unauthorized waste tire piles in Washington state in an expeditious fashion.”

Last year, Democratic lawmakers increased the fee to $5, but they pulled a fast one on consumers who believed the tire fee would go to dealing with waste tires.

The increased fee is expected to generate $2 million annually, but only the first $600,000 goes to tire disposal and cleaning up tire dumps. The rest goes to the state motor vehicle fund, which pays for road maintenance, Puget Sound ferries and other transportation projects.

Washington desperately needs to fund transportation, but the tire fee was meant to ameliorate a different problem. By siphoning off most of its revenue, lawmakers did not leave enough money to deal with 7,100 tons of abandoned tires in a fort-like maze in Richland and dozens of other hazardous tire dumps around the state.

The state transportation budget is $15.5 billion, and Gov. Bob Ferguson is seeking $2.1 billion more. Surely even in tight budget times, the state could set aside $1.1 million or so to pay for cleaning up Richland’s tire dump. While that is a lot of money for normal people, it is a rounding error in state transportation spending.

We urge the Tri-Cities’ legislative delegation to take the lead lobbying their colleagues to devote tire fees to tire remediation. Maybe after Washington has cleaned up its dangerous tire dumps, including misguided tire “reefs” in Puget Sound, the excess can go to transportation projects, but not before.