Los Angeles-The city of Los Angeles, despite being rebuffed in federal court all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, is determined to make another attempt to reverse the ban on trucking biosolids into Kern County for use as fertilizer. The city attorney has filed in superior court in Kern County maintaining that the county’s Measure E, adopted in 2006 banning land application of biosolids in the unincorporated area, violates a number of provisions of federal and state law. According to Assistant City Attorney Ted Jordan, the biosolids case has been back and forth in federal courts, and at one point the city had obtained a permanent injunction against Kern County. “We fought this in federal court and it’s essentially the same issue,” Jordan reported, explaining that “there’s a law in California called the Integrated Waste Management Act that requires governments to recycle to reduce solid wastes going into landfills. “Actually the Supreme Court denied the Los Angeles petition just last year,” Jordan noted. “The reality is the Supreme Court hears very few cases of this type. They accept a very small number no matter what the merits.” He said “Los Angeles is basically filing the same claims made in federal court, maintaining that Kern is violating IWMA and exceeding their police powers, which as the suit asserts affects governments and private parties outside the county and also violates the commerce clause under federal and state law.”
Transparency Across the Fertilizer Value-Chain