LITTLE BOSTON — The Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe received a welcome, and not so unexpected, early Christmas gift Monday in the form of $2.75 million settlement from the Kitsap County and Waste Management of Washington, Inc.

The resolution has been 11 years in the making.

Discussions began in 1995 when the tribe discovered the Hansville Landfill — the original dump, which was used before Waste Management opened its solid waste and garbage dump site off Hansville Road — was contaminating streams, creeks and water tables that flowed through tribal land.

“The number of chemicals, including vinyl chloride, showing up in streams was above the human health risk concentrations,” said tribal water resource program manager and hydrogeologist Dave Fuller. “We determined it was coming from the Hansville Landfill. Eventually, those involved approached the Washington State Department of Ecology and began the agreement process to try and clear everything up.”

The county, which owns the property that houses the now capped landfill, is paying about $1.53 million of the money awarded to the tribe, according to county communication official PJ Ramos. The funds will not be used for cleanup of the contaminated areas, some 300 acres, but rather to resolve the potential claim the tribe planned to file.

“That money is coming from our solid waste settlement fund,” said Kitsap County Commissioner Chris Endresen. “We worked with insurance carriers to help us with the cost of closing landfills in the early 1990s. We actually wound up suing the insurance company, and the money from the settlement we put into a fund to be used exactly for situations like this. We actually had this situation in mind when we created the fund.”

The tribe plans to use the funds to help pay off a $4.3 million loan it used to purchase 390 acres from the Washington State Department of Natural Resources in November 2004, said Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribal Chairman Ron Charles.

“This was loosely a plan of ours all along,” Charles said. “We are pleased because we accomplished our goals here. There’s always good and bad in situations like these. As difficult as that was to deal with, we feel this was the best outcome.”

The former landfill, which is located southeast of the reservation, started operation in 1962.

Waste Management served as the primary operator, shutting it down and sealing it off in the early 1990s, Fuller said.

The landfill was built on roughly three acres of sandy soil, which chemicals seeped through over time. When they reached the water table, they entered various creeks and streams on the reservation.

“We finally got a reliable remedial investigation, and now the state is looking it over,” Fuller said. The remedial investigation reviews how agencies can proceed in their effort to improve the site. “Once that’s approved, we’ll go into a feasibility study, basically examining how feasible it will be to clean up the site, and the best and most reasonable options to address the harmful chemicals.”

Vinyl chloride, the most potent of the batch, is created when certain plastics break down through the process of decomposition, he said. It turns into a highly toxic gas when it is exposed to open air and flows with the groundwater.

Fortunately, this and other chemicals aren’t reaching nearby Port Gamble Bay, and there have been no signs of contamination in that body of water, Fuller said.

“We hoped that this would work out when we first started talking about it with the county,” Charles said. “We told them we wanted something in lieu of the land we can no longer use. I think this was a fair outcome.”