Chris Kelly’s powerful article amplifies the tragic realities our area will face if the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and Governor Tom Wolf allow this preventable disaster to happen. Write and tell Governor Wolf and the PADEP to deny the expansion: http://www.friendsoflackawanna.org/write-a-letter
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Excerpt:
The proposed expansion of Keystone Sanitary Landfill in Dunmore and Throop is a preventable disaster in progress. If approved, “Mount Trashmore” will defile and define not just its “host communities,” but all of Northeast Pennsylvania for the next half-century and beyond. It will stain the region as a vast dump unfit for business investment, job creation or family relocation.
Who chooses to move into the shadow of a mountain of trash? No one who can afford to live and raise a family Anywhere Else. What major employer wants to bring jobs to a region whose most visible industry is garbage? None that can invest Anywhere Else.
“If you’re on the fence (about moving here), it doesn’t just knock you off the fence, it makes you run away from the fence,” said Pat Clark, a founding member of the anti-expansion grassroots group Friends of Lackawanna.
And yet the state Department of Environmental “Protection” is weighing whether to consign the families and businesses of our region to being dumped on with mostly out-of-state trash for the next 42-plus years to benefit a single family accustomed to getting the best government money can buy.
“It really is a state permit to pollute,” Pat said. “It’s giving an entity the state-sanctioned right to desecrate your future forever. That’s just not how environmental protection is supposed to work.”