St. Bernard Parish has reached a settlement with SDT Waste & Debris services involving the cost of waste disposal, the parish announced Tuesday.

SDT will pay the parish $204,000 for the use of a waste transfer station, but an independent auditor picked by the St. Bernard Parish President Craig Taffaro and paid by the parish and SDT says he found no evidence of overbilling or wrongdoing by SDT, and the auditor says, regardless, any potential outside trash paid for by St. Bernard would be offset by hauling costs. The auditor says SDT should have been paid, though that payment was never part of any agreement.

The auditor, certified public accountant Harold Asher, spent a few weeks looking over documents supplied by SDT and St. Bernard.  

As reported in a series of 4 Investigates reports, since operating that transfer station, St. Bernard's landfill fees increased in one month by approximately 11,000 tons. SDT placed the increase on new construction debris in the parish. But Taffaro says SDT owed the parish as much as $3 million for billing them for outside trash.

Tuesday, the independent auditor basically sided with SDT.

"The report issued today by an independent forensic accountant hired by St. Bernard Parish confirms what we have been saying along: SDT’s actions have been proper and there has been no wrong doing with regard to the parish’s transfer station.  We look forward to continuing to serve the parish and the residents of St. Bernard,” said Sidney Torres in a statement.   

“There is no certainty in this,” said Asher.  “I told the parish, and included in my report that I couldn't in fact eliminate uncertainty and present a finding with a high degree of confidence, but that the cost of doing that would be significant. My estimate would be in the $250,000 to $300000 range.”

When asked, however, how much confidence he had in the report, “I have a high degree of confidence,” Asher responded.

When Taffaro was asked if he agreed with Asher’s finding, “I have to defer to the expert,” he replied. “And I’ve said all along what I see is I need someone to validate. Do I think there was co-mingling?  Obviously there was co-mingling. We’ve been saying that all along.  There was debris from all over the metropolitan area into the transfer station.”

“I feel comfortable that an independent party has looked at it and has basically come to a conclusion that we can all live by,” said Wayne Landry, St. Bernard Council chair.

But there are still questions that the independent auditor is unable to answer.  For example, analyzing from May to November of 2007, according to SDT documents, its commercial business increased 252 percent, but in this month its commercial tonnage delivered to the landfill decreased by more than 800 tons.  In that same stretch, St. Bernard's tonnage increased more than 9,000 tons and the city of New Orleans decreased.

“We attempted to analyze and to go into detail into the SDT books and records to perform that kind of analysis.  And within our timeframe, we didn’t have the time to do that,” said Asher.

This investigation is now finished in St. Bernard, but an investigation into potential overbilling and also environmental issues continues elsewhere, as a federal grand jury has begun to look at many of the same documents analyzed by the independent auditor this month.

While the auditor cleared SDT for overbilling, he said that the parish, in one case, could owe SDT money for hauling that benefited the parish.