Wastewater spill may signal end for county’s last full-scale
operation
Gilroy – The Furtado dairy is facing stringent environmental restrictions that could ultimately spell the end of large-scale dairy farming in Santa Clara County.
Four days after Manuel Furtado was criminally charged for pumping 240,000 gallons of wastewater into a creek that runs along his Ferguson Avenue farm, the Central Coast Regional Water Resources Control Board ordered him to drastically overhaul his operation or face losing his right to discharge wastewater.
If Furtado does not execute the series of reforms by the end of August, the regional board will cut by as much as two-thirds the amount of wastewater the dairy may discharge, a move that would force Furtado to make significant cuts to his stock of about 650 cows.
“These are not ordinary violations,” Harvey Packard, a water board engineer, said of the myriad environmental transgressions cited in the order. “They are not something we’re used to seeing with our permitted dischargers. These are things that are required by an existing order. Mr. Furtado obviously hasn’t been complying with the order for many years.”
The dairy has a history of environmental violations that stretches back more than 20 years, but the spill in May, which resulted in a 4.5-mile flow of manure water that nearly reached Llagas Creek, was so egregious that it drew the attention of Santa Clara County prosecutors, the regional board and a personal injury attorney. And it may have catastrophic financial consequences for the Furtado family.
In addition to the substantial expenses of complying with the regional board’s order and fines for not doing so, Furtado is facing criminal fines up to $225,000 and a lawsuit from one of his neighbors. The dairy farm is also two years and about $20,000 dollars behind in its property tax payments.
The dairy has been in Gilroy for about 40 years, though it was closed from 1986 to 1992. Furtado keeps 450 dairy cows and another 200 bulls and calves on the 80-acre property. There is a boutique dairy in San Martin, but the Furtado dairy is the last large-scale operation in the county.
“I have not thought about getting rid of the dairy, but of course there is a financial worry,” Furtado said Friday. “It could [put me out of business], but I don’t really know what they’re after. I’ll just have to try to do whatever needs to be done.”
Furtado said that he has not yet hired an attorney and hasn’t seen the criminal charges or the regional board’s cleanup order, but has hired a consultant to craft a groundwater monitoring plan, as the order requires. The order also demands that Furtado produce a plan to cut his wastewater discharge by two-thirds until he is able to create additional irrigation and percolation areas, repair damaged levees and berms, and remove solid waste from the property.
If the tasks are not accomplished by Aug. 31, Furtado faces fines of up to $5,000 a day or $10 for each gallon of discharge.
It’s been a week of bad news for Furtado. Earlier this week, his Dunlap Avenue neighbor, George Ekberg, said he will sue Furtado, alleging that the farmer’s negligence repeatedly caused wastewater to flood his yard.
Ekberg’s attorney, Amy Carlson of the San Jose firm Hinkle Jachimowicz Pointer & Mayron, said her client was exasperated after years of complaining to a number of agencies about Furtado’s failure to properly dispose of his wastewater.
“Every day, he wakes up to the foul stench of manure passing by his house,” Carlson said. “Every night when he comes home from work, he goes to bed to it. He complained to anyone he could find and he got nowhere. Maybe this will get their attention.”
And Furtado faces jail time. Monday, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s office filed three misdemeanor charges against him, alleging that he discharged water in excess of his permit and dumped 20,000 gallons of water polluted with waste from the farm’s 600 cows.
One of the charges, a violation of the state’s fish and game code, carries a $10-per-gallon fine, imposed at a judge’s discretion. Furtado also faces a $25,000 fine under the state water code. Deputy District Attorney Kenneth Rosenblatt said the decision to charge Furtado with far less than the full amount of the spill was a strategic decision.
The spill was discovered May 13 when an anonymous caller tipped off the Santa Clara Valley Water District that the Alamias Creek, which runs just west of the Ferguson Road dairy, appeared to be filled with wastewater.
The water, full of cow manure and compounds harmful to fish and humans, traveled 4.5 miles through the Alamias, stopping just short of the Llagas Creek headwaters south of Pacheco Pass Highway. Environmental officials said the spill was hazardous to the endangered steelhead trout, which migrates through the Llagas, and a potential threat to the groundwater basin.
Furtado has consistently maintained that the spill was an accident. He said at the time that he was draining two of his retention ponds into a nearby field and didn’t realize the water was reaching a trench that runs along the field and feeds the Alamias.
The water in the dairy’s six retention ponds is repeatedly flushed through the dairy to clean manure from the feed barns. In ideal conditions it would evaporate before Furtado is forced to pump it. Furtado is allowed to pump at his discretion into nearby fields but must ensure that none of it reaches state waterways.
Since the May spill, Furtado’s neighbors have said the farm’s problems have been an open secret in the neighborhood.
“For 20 years, I’ve been telling them not to dump water into that ditch,” said Evelyn Della-Santa, who’s lived in the area all her life and used to own a parcel now covered by the dairy’s retention ponds. “They’re just stubborn.”
