An Estancia rancher whose property borders the Estancia Valley Solid Waste Authority has filed a lawsuit against the facility.
“For a number of years, they’ve (EVSWA) completely failed to mitigate trash blowing away and blowing off their landfill onto these people’s property,” said attorney Blair Dunn who represents Ernie and Kim Ortiz.
The most recent incident, according to the lawsuit, was the death of a cow in July, but Dunn said there has been more than one dead cow as a result of trash from the facility.
In other instances, Dunn said the facility paid for the cows, but in this instance, they did not.
“There was a chewed up milk jug or some piece of plastic on the side, (of the cow), that clearly looks like the cow fixated on or at least caused some sort of problems, but it wasn’t actually found inside the cow,” he said.
Because there was no plastic inside the cow, EVSWA refused to pay for its death.
‘We sympathize with you’
A letter dated Oct. 12, from EVSWA’s attorney Michael Garcia to Ortiz, denies that the death of this cow is a result of trash from EVSWA.
“While everyone sympathizes with you for the loss, the evidence is far from clear that it resulted from trash from the Authority’s landfill,” he writes.
Garcia states in the letter that July was unusually hot and several animals in the area died as a result of the heat. A necropsy, Garcia states, found no foreign objects inside the cow.
“Which is something that would seem to be necessary to conclude that an object, such as the bag, asphyxiated the animal,” he said. “And the bag from the photo, upon information and belief, was moved from some distance and placed near the animal before the photo was taken.”
In his letter, Garcia encourages Ortiz to submit further evidence that this cow died as a result of trash from the facility stating that he would be willing to bring it to the EVSWA Board’s attention.
“In the meantime, you should file your claim with EVSWA’s insurer,” he said.
In a February letter to Ortiz, EVSWA’s insurer denied liability for the dead cow because there was, “no certainty that the plastic bag is considered the cause of death. There is no way to prove where the trash came from and therefore the allegations cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.”
The Independent reached out to EVSWA for comment, but a representative from the facility said they could not comment due to pending litigation.
Even if EVSWA had paid for this cow, Dunn said it wouldn’t have gotten rid of the need for this particular litigation, because the facility wasn’t doing what was needed to make the problem go away.
“They were just occasionally paying for the loss of a cow,” Dunn said. “That doesn’t take away from the fact that they’ve diminished the value of the property as a whole because nobody wants to own or buy trash property.”