RICHMOND –– The owner of an illegal stump dump off Skunk Hill Road is complying with a consent agreement signed with the town in January to clean up the site.

That’s the conclusion of Town Council President B. Joe Reddish III and council member Henry R. Oppenheimer, who toured the site yesterday.

During the visit Romanoff test-ran a tree stump grinder and showed them areas where pesticide had been applied.

Under the accord, Romanoff agreed to clean up the site, grinding and removing all waste. He admitted no liability.

“He’s working on it,” Reddish said of the site cleanup, adding that he and Oppenheimer would visit the site again prior to the council’s Sept. 2 meeting.

The two next plan to visit during the daytime to see the grinder at work, they said. (Yesterday’s visit came late in the afternoon, and under the consent agreement the grinder can be operational only during business hours due to the noise it emits.)

Yesterday Romanoff started the grinder for a short time to demonstrate the noise level.

Oppenheimer, who had visited the site a week earlier with Terrence Gray –– the state Department of Environmental Management’s assistant director for air, waste and compliance –– said Romanoff had “done a lot of the prep work,” splitting the stumps and screening material from the roots, such as stones, that could jam the grinder.

The councilmen’s comments yesterday were in contrast to those of a day earlier, when frustrated council members discussed whether the initial 90-day consent order had been violated. Specifically, the councilmen questioned whether Romanoff had provided proper notice of the type of grinder he would be using and whether grinding had commenced.

“There has been no violation of the consent order,” his lawyer, Barbara E. Grady, said yesterday. “Mr. Romanoff has been working in very good faith, diligently to comply with the consent order.”

Romanoff declined to comment yesterday, but Reddish and Oppenheimer said during their site visit that Romanoff had told them the work was under way and that several trucks had hauled away some wood chips earlier that day.

Grady said she couldn’t quantify how much material had been removed from the site. But at this point, she said, the focus remains on preparing the material to be ground, given the logistics and economics of the grinding process.

“The grinding is the simple part,” she said. “The more time-consuming part is preparing the material to be ground.”

Moreover, she said, given the cost of running the grinder, “it doesn’t make sense to start it and stop it.”

Grady also said that Romanoff has continued to apply Niban, cockroach bait, at the site on his own. Previously, Romanoff had hired a pesticide company from Westerly.

The consent order requires the pesticide treatments.

marmenta@projo.com