In “Time to Dump Landfill Protests,” the Chronicle lays out reasons for trashing the efforts of the little people.
Reason 1:
There’s nowhere else for the anti-landfill group to turn short of the Illinois Supreme Court, which might decline to hear the case.
Stop the Mega Dump should quit because the Supremes might reject it? WTH?
Reason 2:
It’s understandable that an expansion that would allow the landfill to accept as many as 2,000 tons of trash a day would be unpopular. At some point, however, the community and the company should be allowed to move forward.
Yeah, like maybe after an attempt at a Supreme Court appeal. What’s the rush, Chronicle?
Reason 3:
The impact of the expansion has not been felt. Waste Management has assured residents that a larger landfill will not endanger their health and safety.
Wow, great show of healthy journalistic skepticism.
More importantly, though, the newspaper is in effect trashing STMD’s contention that the process of approving the expansion was so fundamentally flawed, the threats to public health such as hydrogen sulfide emissions, groundwater contamination and vulnerabilities to seismic activity were never seriously examined and considered.
And when it comes to poor Cortland, the real issue is not, as the paper stated, that “…the County Board’s authority trumps that of the township.” In fact, it’s quite the opposite.
Sec. 30-120. Garbage. The electors may prevent the deposit of night soil, garbage, or other offensive substances within the limits of the township. This Section does apply to refuse disposal facilities regulated by the Illinois Department of Public Health and the county in which the facilities are located.
The township’s problem is that the law has never been tested. In other words, DeKalb County is benefiting from the lack of case law precedents. It can say whatever it wants to, and unfortunately the Chronicle is only to happy to take the words of powerful interested parties and publish them as gospel.
The larger picture o’ shame, of course, is that a group of citizens is trying to hold its local and state governments accountable, and instead of welcoming a watchdog the newspaper of record is scolding it (however nonsensically) and telling it to scram.
3 comments
Comment by Mac McIntyre on November 5, 2012 at 8:08 am
To weigh evidence you must first look at it, review it. The IPCB and Appellate Court refused to do so. Most of us whether we were opposed to the landfill expansion process or not knew certain board members had made up their mind, including the Chronicle.
Here is the FIRST question asked of all county board candidates in the Chronicle’s Election Central:
What a disservice to this community.
Comment by markcharvat on November 5, 2012 at 1:39 pm
I’m sad to see the new slant of the Daily Chronicle is very Pro-establishment. This is evident in just about all the editorials that have been published since the new DC editor took over. Looks like we’ll have to wait for this new editor to put in his 18 months and then depart (if he follows the DC revolving door tradition)
Comment by yinn on November 5, 2012 at 3:06 pm
Back when I was on the city’s Citizens Environmental Commission there was a conversation between a county board member and a city employee about the landfill only having seven years of room left and how much good the county could do with the tipping fees. Protecting the tipping fees for the county was so important there was a plan for DeKalb to sign a “pre-annexation” agreement with Waste Management if Cortland showed any inclination to annex the landfill property (and capture the fees for itself). The “pre-annexation” agreement would have been good for 25 years, they said.
That would have been probably about ’07 but certainly before July ’08, which is when I left CEC; and it shows how early they were thinking about the money from an expansion, at least in a general way. If I remember correctly, this did come up when I was deposed.
It’s funny how we are ALWAYS 6-7 years from reaching landfill capacity.
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