After more than a decade of repeated environmental law violations, a trash transfer and demolition company in Ward 5 must pay $100,000 for polluting District waterways, D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb announced on April 25.
The court found Rodgers Brothers Custodial Services, Inc. responsible for five separate instances in which the company illegally discharged pollution directly into stormwater basins near its facility on Lawrence Avenue NE.
“If you participate in activities that pollute District waters, you will be held accountable,” said Assistant Attorney General Wesley Rosenfeld, who handled the case. “You will have to face the District of Columbia Office of the Attorney General and have to pay a civil penalty if you violated the law.”
Company President George Rodgers Jr. will have to pay $50,000 of the penalty himself. The court ruled that he was personally responsible for two of the five incidents documented between 2016 to 2021.
Rodgers Jr. did not respond to requests for comment. His company no longer operates at the site in Ward 5’s Langdon neighborhood — it shut down the site earlier this year and no longer seems to own the property, Rosenfeld said.
Rodgers Brothers did have another location in Capitol Heights, Md., but the Better Business Bureau website notes that the company as a whole is “believed to be out of business.”
A Long History of Legal Tussles
The Office of Attorney General’s (OAG) complaint against Rodgers Brothers, filed in 2021, documents a pattern of warnings, citations and fines for pollution problems going back to 2012. But the company’s history of conflict with the D.C. government began at least two decades before that.
In 1992, the District filed a complaint against Rodgers Brothers and a neighboring business, alleging that “the Lawrence Avenue property contained excess trash and garbage and that an ‘open dump’ was being operated at the site.”
Five years later, the D.C. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs issued a $500 fine for improper use of the property. The company was “processing” waste materials when its paperwork only approved “temporary storage” of the items.
One major basis for that 1997 ruling was testimony from an inspector, who had witnessed the use of a “grinding machine” to mash up trash and dirt. Rodgers Brothers appealed the decision to the zoning board, and then to the Court of Appeals — both sided with D.C. to affirm the original decision.
“[The inspector] saw lots of dust coming from the Rodgers Brothers’ site, smelled a noxious odor on the property [and] noticed materials on the site which could not be described as construction and demolition debris, including ‘batteries oozing a green liquid’ and ‘large piles of scrap tires,’” the Court of Appeal’s 2004 decision reads.
Fast forward nearly a decade: the D.C. Department of Energy and Environment (DOEE) issued Rodgers Brothers an $8,000 penalty in late 2013 for violating the District’s Water Pollution Control Act. Less than six months after that, a DOEE inspector witnessed “dark clouds of dust” coming off the site, according to the Attorney General’s 2021 complaint. D.C. orders the company to pay a $600 penalty for breaking the city’s air pollution law.
Two years later, inspectors saw company leaders “using a hose to rinse the roadway of sediment,” causing the site’s waste — including petroleum and demolition debris — to flow into the storm basins, and thus into Hickey Run stream and the Anacostia River. That 2016 incident was one of the five specific violations for which the court found Rodgers Brothers liable.
“On one of those days, the inspector went out during a rain event, and as it rained, he observed [debris] coming off the facility and entering a storm sewer — and it was so clogged with sediment that essentially it started to flood Lawrence Avenue,” Rosenfeld said.
Ward 5 Still Waiting for Environmental Justice
About half of all industrially zoned land in the District falls in Ward 5, and much of it cuts through historic Black residential neighborhoods. Less than a mile away from the Rodgers Brothers property, a small chemical facility in Ivy City literally shares a wall with a family home.
Residents in nearby Brentwood are fighting to keep the city from building a bus terminal in their neighborhood, which already endures air pollution and odors from many other industrial facilities — including a garbage transfer center, a residential trash company and a cement company.
“Environmental racism is real, alive…and it’s a monster,” said Brentwood ANC Commissioner Darlene Oliver, speaking at Empower DC’s Environmental Justice Summit on April 27.
Rosenfeld said that the city’s $100,000 win in the case against Rodgers Brothers demonstrated the Attorney General’s office’s focus on enforcing environmental laws and pursuing environmental justice for residents harmed by polluters.
Years before the judgment was announced, the court had ordered Rodgers Brothers to immediately implement pollution control measures. For about two years, the company met the requirements, as other industrial facilities in the Hickey Run stream’s watershed and across the city manage to do. But sometime in late 2023 or early 2024, Rosenfeld said, the facility stopped running.
“The company has stopped operating there, which I do believe is a victory,” he said. “This is a residential area in Ward 5, and it’s been a problem for residents and District inspectors for a long time. And so, that this activity is no longer occurring, I think is a victory.”
There are houses within 500 feet of the Rodgers Brothers Lawrence Avenue NE location, but the homes don’t sit directly next to or across the street from it.
Sharon Edwards, a longtime resident and advocate for environmental justice in Brentwood, said she wanted to see the OAG take on companies that sit right behind houses in her neighborhood.
Edwards, who experiences asthma and other respiratory issues, can count “seven or eight” industrial facilities right around her home, polluting the air alongside the near-constant presence of idling trucks.
“Hopefully [the Rodgers Brothers suit] is a start for Ward 5,” Edwards said. “But in the meantime, I’m trying to figure out why the attorney general’s office hasn’t addressed things that I’ve been talking about for years.”