TCEQ Finds Illegal Dump Of 19,000 Tires In Far East El Paso County

The I-team has uncovered an illegal dumping site with 19,000 tires. The site is on private property in East El Paso County.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality confirmed the owners are Rodolfo and Angelica Esparza. We looked for them at their home inside the property where the tires are located. No one answered the door.

According to the TCEQ, the agency has sent a notice to the owners to clean up the site, or face a hefty fee, that could end up costing them $10,000 per day, per violation.

If the property owners, don’t clean the property, then the case heads to the Attorney General’s office.

Under state law, residents are allowed to have 500 tires in their property grounds.

The Chief of Staff for State Representative Chente Quintanilla said there’s just not enough man-power to monitor the flow of tires.

Representative Chente Quintanilla is drafting legislation to provide incentives for companies to drop off tires in a legal dumping site.

Also, The I-team has uncovered a legal loophole that allows tire transporters to pocket disposal fees from tire shops, and instead of properly disposing of the tires, the companies could illegally dump the rubber hazards in the desert.

There is no government agency or group monitoring the transporters, or the tire shops.

When a customer buys a new tire, the tire shops charge an environmental fee, ranging from $1.50 to $5.00 if the owner of the vehicle wants the tire shops to dispose of that tire.

The tire shops then contract and pay a transporting company to take the tires to a registered, legal, disposing site.

The transporting company then pays the site for disposing the tires properly.

However, residents in far East El Paso County fear transporting companies may be pocketing the money from tire shops and dumping the tires in the desert.

They’re also concerned some small “fix-flat” shops in the county may not even be hiring a transporting company, and disposing the tires in the desert themselves.

While they are aware of the problem, Cristina Viesca-Santos, the Environmental Prosecutor with the El Paso County attorney’s office, explained illegal dumping is incredibly hard to prove.

“We have to literally catch them in the act”, she said.

Tires aren’t traceable to owners or tire shops, so the dozens and dozens of stacks of tires in the desert in the county are virtually impossible to pinpoint to a suspect of illegal dumping.

According to Viesca-Santos, the El Paso County Attorney prosecuted 12 cases of illegal dumping of tires in fiscal year 2009. In that same year, there were 122 cases of illegal dumping overall.

“People just aren’t reporting them”, she said.

Antonio Perez, an East El Paso County resident, who also runs a fix-flat business says people there don’t seem to care about the hundreds of tires on the side of the road, in the desert, and in residential areas.

He said many times, his customers don’t want to pay the disposal fee he charges, so they take their used tires, and possible abandon them in the desert.

However, Louis Vargas, another county resident, does mind the mess. He said he constantly wakes up to more tires in his neighborhood, sometimes dumped on vacant lots or street corners. The morning we went to his neighborhood, located on Hugo Perez Street, we noticed dozens of tires across the street from Vargas’ home.

Viesca-Santos said these piles of tires may also be dumped by a sort of “flight-by-night” operators, who are not registered transporters, but who’ll still offer to take tires from the tire companies, keep the cash, and dump the tires in residential or desert areas overnight.