The federal government formally charged a California manufacturer with violating the nation’s primary hazardous waste law, then settled the case so quickly and quietly that the public has almost no way of knowing what was done, what was dumped, or what penalty, if any, the company paid.

What the Government Actually Filed

Dec. 11, 2025 The U.S. EPA Region IX office in San Francisco, California, issued a Certificate of Service confirming that an Expedited Settlement Agreement and Final Order had been filed against Scott Manufacturing Solutions, Inc. The docket number is RCRA-09-2026-0015. The “RCRA” designation tells you everything: this is a hazardous waste case, governed by the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the federal statute that exists specifically to prevent companies from poisoning communities through reckless waste handling.

Scott Manufacturing Solutions operates out of 5051 Edison Avenue in Chino, California. Chino sits in San Bernardino County, a region already carrying a heavy industrial pollution burden. The company received formal legal service via electronic mail, delivered to two named company representatives: Dana Klingler, the Quality Systems & Assurance Manager, and Cindy L. Klingler, the Chief Operating Officer.

The EPA’s enforcing attorney of record is Andrew Helmlinger, a Supervisory Attorney Adviser in the Hazardous Waste Section at Region IX. This is not a routine compliance letter. Supervisory-level attorneys get involved when the agency believes a violation is serious enough to require formal enforcement with legal teeth.

What “Expedited Settlement” Really Means For You

An Expedited Settlement Agreement is the EPA’s fast-track resolution tool. It allows the agency and a company to close a case without a full public hearing, without lengthy discovery, and without the kind of public airing that would force the company to defend its practices in open proceedings. For companies, it is enormously advantageous. For the public, it means the details of what actually happened, how much hazardous waste was mishandled and where it went, often disappear into a sealed agreement.

The Certificate of Service issued by Regional Hearing Clerk Ponly Tu confirms only that the agreement was filed and served. It does not disclose the penalty amount, the specific violations admitted, the volume or type of hazardous waste involved, or any remediation requirements. Based on the source material provided, those figures are [REDACTED – Not in Source].

The Non-Financial Ledger

The Cost That Never Appears in a Settlement

When regulators settle a hazardous waste case through an expedited process, the resulting document records dollar figures and legal citations. It does not record the anxiety of parents in Chino, California, who cannot be certain whether the soil beneath their children’s feet, the groundwater feeding their taps, or the air moving through their windows carries residue from a manufacturing facility that the federal government confirmed was operating outside the law.

San Bernardino County, where Chino sits, already ranks among the most pollution-burdened regions in California. The community surrounding the 5051 Edison Avenue address is an industrial zone, which in American geography almost always means the surrounding residential population skews lower-income, is disproportionately composed of communities of color, and has fewer political and financial resources to fight back when a company gets caught and quickly settles its way out of public accountability. The residents of these communities do not get an expedited settlement. They get a lifetime of elevated exposure risk and a government document that tells them almost nothing.

RCRA violations are serious by federal definition. The law exists because the United States spent decades watching companies dump, bury, and burn hazardous materials with impunity, poisoning Superfund sites from Woburn, Massachusetts to Hinkley, California. Congress created RCRA specifically to require manufacturers to track, store, and dispose of hazardous waste in ways that prevent it from entering the environment. When a company violates RCRA, it means the safeguards designed to prevent that contamination were bypassed. Something went wrong with the chain of custody for materials that have no business touching a human body, a water table, or a food chain.

The people most exposed to those consequences are the workers inside the Scott Manufacturing Solutions facility on Edison Avenue. Workers in manufacturing environments are the first line of exposure to hazardous materials when management fails to follow the law. They breathe the air, handle the materials, and work on the floors closest to wherever the violation occurred. Their names do not appear in the Certificate of Service. They are not parties to the settlement. And under an expedited agreement process, the public, including those workers and their families, may never know precisely what they were exposed to, for how long, or what the company has agreed to do about it.

The two individuals who did appear in the document, Dana Klingler as Quality Systems & Assurance Manager and Cindy L. Klingler as Chief Operating Officer, accepted legal service on behalf of the company. Their titles are instructive. The Quality Systems & Assurance Manager holds the role specifically designed to ensure compliance with regulations exactly like RCRA. The Chief Operating Officer holds operational authority over the entire facility. When a RCRA violation occurs, these are the roles the law expects to prevent it. The fact that a formal federal enforcement action named the company on their watch is a statement about where accountability stopped inside Scott Manufacturing Solutions.

A settlement labeled “expedited” and “final” tells the public that the matter is closed. It tells regulators that the docket can be archived. It does not tell the community in Chino whether their neighborhood is cleaner or safer today than it was before the EPA filed its case. Closure for a corporation is a legal category. For people who live and work near a facility that violated hazardous waste law, closure requires a different kind of evidence entirely, and the source document for this story does not provide it.

Legal Receipts

Directly From the Document

The following are direct factual statements and verbatim language drawn from the EPA’s Certificate of Service. These are the words the government used, on the record, in an official legal filing.

“Expedited Settlement Agreement and Final Order in the matter of Scott Manufacturing Solutions, Inc.” U.S. EPA Region IX, Certificate of Service, Dec. 11, 2025 — The formal title of the enforcement action confirms this was a negotiated resolution, not a contested hearing. The company settled.

“Docket No. RCRA-09-2026-0015” U.S. EPA Region IX, Certificate of Service, Dec. 11, 2025 — The “RCRA” prefix designates this as a Resource Conservation and Recovery Act enforcement action. This is a federal hazardous waste case.

“Dana Klingler, Quality Systems & Assurance Manager, Scott Manufacturing Solutions, Inc., 5051 Edison Avenue, Chino, CA 91710” U.S. EPA Region IX, Certificate of Service, Dec. 11, 2025 — The company’s own quality and compliance manager is a named respondent recipient. The person whose job is regulatory compliance was served with a federal enforcement notice.

“Cindy L. Klingler, Chief Operating Officer, LBBP, Scott Manufacturing Solutions, Inc., 5051 Edison Avenue, Chino, CA 91710” U.S. EPA Region IX, Certificate of Service, Dec. 11, 2025 — The Chief Operating Officer of the company, the individual with the highest operational authority, is also a named respondent. This is an executive-level accountability event.

“Andrew Helmlinger, Supervisory Attorney Adviser, U.S. EPA – Region IX, Hazardous Waste Section I (ORC-3-1)” U.S. EPA Region IX, Certificate of Service, Dec. 11, 2025 — A supervisory-level federal attorney in the dedicated Hazardous Waste Section handled this case. This is the EPA’s specialized enforcement infrastructure, not a routine inspection referral.

Societal Impact Mapping

Environmental Degradation

RCRA exists because hazardous industrial waste does not stay where it is placed. It leaches into groundwater. It vaporizes into air. It binds to soil particles and travels up the food chain. Scott Manufacturing Solutions operates in Chino, California, a city in the San Bernardino Valley, a region where groundwater contamination from industrial activity has a documented, decades-long history. The Chino Basin is one of Southern California’s critical groundwater basins, supplying drinking water to a large portion of the Inland Empire.

When a manufacturer violates RCRA at a facility sitting atop or near a critical groundwater basin, the environmental stakes are not abstract. The specific type of hazardous waste involved, its volume, and the precise nature of the violation are not disclosed in the source document. What the source document confirms is that a federal enforcement action under RCRA was initiated and settled. The gap between “settled” and “remediated” can span years, and communities in the path of contamination rarely see the full picture until the damage is already done.

An expedited settlement does not require the kind of public environmental impact assessment that a contested enforcement proceeding would generate. The community around 5051 Edison Avenue in Chino is therefore left without a public record of what was contaminated, what was cleaned up, and what monitoring, if any, the settlement requires going forward. That information gap is itself an environmental harm: without data, residents cannot make informed decisions about their exposure, and local health agencies cannot respond appropriately.

Public Health

The workers at Scott Manufacturing Solutions’ Chino facility are the population most directly at risk from RCRA violations at that address. Hazardous waste mishandling inside a manufacturing facility can mean improper storage of reactive, corrosive, toxic, or ignitable materials. It can mean inadequate ventilation, missing labels, improper containers, or waste streams mixed in ways that create new chemical hazards. Workers operating in those conditions may not even be aware of the specific materials they are exposed to, because RCRA violations often involve the precise record-keeping and labeling failures that would otherwise give workers that information.

The residential community surrounding the Edison Avenue facility also faces public health exposure risk, particularly through air emissions and potential groundwater impact. San Bernardino County communities in industrial zones consistently appear in California’s CalEnviroScreen tool as among the most environmentally burdened in the state, carrying cumulative pollution loads from transportation corridors, warehouses, and manufacturing facilities. Adding a RCRA violation from a nearby manufacturer to that existing burden compounds health risks that the people in those neighborhoods are already disproportionately shouldering.

The source document provides no information about whether the EPA required Scott Manufacturing Solutions to conduct health monitoring, notify affected workers, or test surrounding soil and water as conditions of the settlement. The absence of that information in the public record is a public health problem in its own right. Exposed populations cannot seek medical evaluation for conditions they do not know they may have been exposed to.

Economic Inequality

Industrial facilities that generate and mishandle hazardous waste are not distributed randomly across American geography. They concentrate in communities with lower land values, less political influence, and fewer economic alternatives. Chino, California is not a wealthy enclave. The neighborhoods surrounding industrial corridors like Edison Avenue are populated largely by working-class families, many of whom work in the same manufacturing and logistics sector that generates the pollution they are exposed to at home.

When the EPA resolves a RCRA enforcement action through an expedited settlement, the company pays whatever penalty was negotiated, absorbs it as a cost of doing business, and continues operations. The community absorbs the residual environmental risk with no corresponding financial relief, no direct compensation, and no guaranteed remediation timeline. This is the economic arithmetic of industrial pollution in low-income communities: the company externalizes the cost onto the neighborhood, the neighborhood has no mechanism to bill the company back, and the settlement closes the legal books without closing the health and environmental exposure books.

The two named corporate officers in this case hold management and executive titles. Their facility generated hazardous waste, violated federal law governing that waste, and resolved the matter through a negotiated agreement. The workers who operate that facility, and the neighbors who live near it, had no seat at the negotiating table. That asymmetry is not incidental to the story. It is the story.

The Cost of a Life Metric

What the source document does confirm: a supervisory-level federal hazardous waste attorney pursued this case, two named executives accepted service, and the matter was resolved by final order. Whatever the penalty figure is, it was negotiated behind closed doors. The workers and neighbors who bear the physical risk of RCRA violations at this facility were not part of that negotiation.

What Now?

Named Officers Two individuals are directly named in this enforcement action as the corporate representatives who accepted service on behalf of Scott Manufacturing Solutions, Inc.:

Take Action If you live or work near 5051 Edison Avenue in Chino, California, connect with local environmental justice organizations in San Bernardino County. Groups like the Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice (CCAEJ) organize specifically around industrial pollution in the Inland Empire. File a public records request directly with EPA Region IX for the full Expedited Settlement Agreement, including the penalty amount and any remediation conditions. Share the docket number, RCRA-09-2026-0015, when you contact regulators. Your right to know what is in that settlement is not contingent on Scott Manufacturing Solutions wanting you to know.