Today's The Scranton Times-Tribune Editorial titled "Structure of an engaged community" is worth your time. Please read it. And let your voice be heard tonight at 6pm at the Dunmore Community Center. The always creative John Cole (Coletoons - John Cole political cartoons) cartoon accompanies this post.
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Structure of an engaged community
BY THE EDITORIAL BOARD / PUBLISHED: SEPTEMBER 19, 2019
Dunmoreans have an opportunity this evening to warn their elected government against acting as an agent for a powerful private interest. They should not waste it.
Borough council will conduct a public hearing at 6 p.m. in the Dunmore Community Center, 1414 Monroe Ave., on whether it should redefine a key element of the zoning ordinance to suit the Keystone Sanitary Landfill.
The giant landfill plans to become exponentially larger under a four-decade expansion plan that would result in more than 100 million tons of additional garbage, mostly from out-of-state, being deposited in the landfill.
But the plan has run afoul of the borough’s own zoning ordinance, which precludes structures higher than 50 feet in manufacturing zones such as that encompassing the landfill, and of a state appellate court precedent upholding such a prohibition regarding another landfill in Mercer County.
Under the landfill’s plan, it would far exceed the “structure” height restriction. And, since a state appellate court already has ruled the Mercer County landfill is a structure, Keystone is not likely to get around that precedent in its own case pending before the same court.
So it wants Dunmore’s council to rewrite the zoning ordinance to state specifically that a landfill is not a structure.
The ordinance says a “structure” is anything “constructed or erected, the use of which requires location on the ground or attachment to something having a fixed location on the ground.”
Keystone is a highly engineered structure, including complex high-tech collection systems for gas and wastewater, a wastewater treatment plant, passive environmental controls such as liners, monitoring equipment and so on. It is far from a pile of garbage, so much so that the landfill management is justly proud of being the first in the nation to achieve ISO 140001 certification from the International Standards Organization, which it has maintained since 2001.
The borough planning commission recently rolled over for the landfill and recommended, 3-2, that council amend the ordinance and redefine “structure” to meet the landfill’s needs.
Tonight, borough residents should advise council to send that recommendation itself to the landfill for disposal. They should insist that council serve the public interest by maintaining the definition of “structure” and recognizing that the landfill meets it.