State is victim of tire con game

THE PEOPLE who run the state’s nine-year-old scrap tire program should be re-tired. Someone in the state Department of Environmental Quality should have suspected something was amiss when the $6.4 million scrap tire surplus dwindled to $325,000 in just over four years.

Now, we are told that tires have been illegally brought into Louisiana from other states, and the state has paid the processors who recycled those tires. Processors also recoup some of their costs by selling the processed rubber on the open market as raw material for fuel or for making products like asphalt.

MONEY THE state pays processors comes from the state’s scrap tire fund that is replenished whenever anyone buys a new tire for his car, truck or sport utility vehicle. The fee is $2 for every new car tire, $5 for medium-sized truck tires and $10 for off-road tires.

New tire dealers collect the fees and mail them to DEQ. A local dealer said they don’t receive any compensation for the paperwork involved. Old tires are then picked up by the processors.

In addition to paying for the recycling of used tires, the waste tire fund has helped clean up a number of unauthorized tire dumps around the state.

Hal Bohlinger, secretary of DEQ, said he thinks documentation is being altered to pass off out-of-state tires.

That’s obvious, but why wasn’t it detected earlier?

“We’ve pretty much figured it out,” Bohlinger said. “We just haven’t caught anybody in the act yet.”

Bohlinger said the recall of Firestone tires in 2000 also hit the waste tire program hard. Those tires were supposed to go back to the manufacturer, but he said there is no way to tell how many of them might have ended up in the scrap tire program.

“We just know they flooded the system,” he said.

Processing company owners said they reported the unusually large number of tires coming into their plants to DEQ about a year ago.

Thomas Bickham, DEQ undersecretary of management and finance, said his department thought the added costs were caused by a $50-per-ton increase in the fees paid to processors. He said the regulations were also changed to allow processors to accept tires from used tire dealers.

Maybe that’s where the rip-offs come in. Used tire dealers aren’t required to collect waste tire fees when they sell used tires.

Dennis Richard of the Independent Tire Dealers Association, which represents new tire dealers, said DEQ could have detected something was wrong from its own records. He noticed that a used tire store in Campti, which is north of Natchitoches, was sending an average of 3,600 truck tires and 1,700 passenger tires to a processor every month for about 11 months.

Richard said that would make the used tire store one of the largest in the country. And Campti is a town with a population of only 929.

That isn’t the worst of this situation, either. Richard said the tire dealers association hasn’t been able to find the dealer using the address registered with DEQ.

Department officials say they now have a system in place to monitor situations like the one in Campti. They issued a new regulation last week that says used tire dealers have to keep records, and they will be audited by an outside company.

You have to wonder why such a system wasn’t in place before used tire dealers were allowed to participate in the waste tire program.

The department did suspect fraud in some cases and turned those over to local district attorneys. However, nothing has come of those cases and DEQ is still doing business with some of those same companies.

The big problem now is how to replenish the dwindling scrap tire fund.

Bohlinger said he is considering asking the Legislature to assess a tire fee on new cars. People who buy new vehicles aren’t required to pay the $2 and higher fees for the new tires on those vehicles.

Aren’t we paying enough already whenever we buy new tires? Why should we have to pay for mistakes made by DEQ?

HOWEVER, IF money isn’t found somewhere we face the prospect of having illegal tire dumps crop up again all over this state.

This is another example of why voters don’t trust government. And it comes on top of the failure of the TIMED program to four-lane all of the major highways in this state.

What’s next?