Another letter requesting that DEP deny KSL’s expansion. Keep on writing and make sure our voices are heard!
Editor: I sent the following message to Roger Bellas, waste management program manager for the Department of Environmental Protection’s regional office:
“I am writing to voice my hope that the expansion of Keystone Sanitary Landfill will be denied. I believe every state should have to handle their own disposal needs for refuse. When we can throw out anything we want and it is carted a state away we have little reason to change our disposal habits.
“The Lackawanna Valley has been degraded for a century and a half starting with clear cutting of the forests, fouling of the land, air and water from coal mining, installation of multiple unsightly electric power transmission lines and of course the truck traffic, dust, birds, smell and visual disruption from not one but two local landfills. To me the cost-benefit study that was done by the DEP places the health and welfare of all of our current and future residents on one side of the scale and the interests of a powerful, connected family on the other.
“Are we to believe that an honest accounting of the true costs and benefits of the proposed 40-plus-year expansion of this landfill favors a family dynasty with a poor record of environmental stewardship over the future of an entire region? I respectfully ask that this permit application be denied.”
BOB SHUMAKER
SCRANTON