Sometimes it is easier to simply say, "please just read the whole piece." Today is one of those times. Today's The Scranton Times-Tribune editorial points out that a multi-billion organization seems obsessed with how FOL, a 100% volunteer-run organization, continues to battle them. Well, the answer is simple. It is you. Our Friends. It always has been, and always will be, our Friends that allow us to fight. It's something they'll never really understand.
And if you ever want to click "Donate" we will be forever grateful whether it is for $1 or it has a few more zeroes.
Thank you.
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Face-to-face with 100 million tons of trash
BY THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Neighbors of the massive and growing Keystone Sanitary Landfill often smell decaying garbage, but the landfill company smells a conspiracy.
Friends of Lackawanna, a nonprofit group that opposes the landfill expansion, recently appealed to the independent state Environmental Hearing Board, asking it to overturn the Department of Environmental Protection’s ill-considered and unwarranted approval of Keystone’s 40-plus year, 100 million-ton expansion plan.
It’s clear who will pay for that expansion. In terms of dollars it primarily will be out-of-state companies and communities that pay the landfill to dump their millions of tons of garbage in the middle of Lackawanna County. More broadly, it will be the residents of the county and Northeast Pennsylvania who must deal with the environmental and other quality-of-life fallouts from the trash mountain.
But according to landfill consultant Al Magnotta, the real issue is where Friends of Lackawanna gets the money to pester the multibillion-dollar enterprise with permit challenges and the impending formal appeal.
“In America with the constitutional right to litigate comes the constitutional right of the defendant to be face-to-face with the plaintiff,” Magnotta wrote in a prepared statement, suggesting in effect that Friends of Lackawanna is not the true adversary.
Well, who is this unknown Goliath making a David out of the landfill — Eco-terrorists? Greenpeace? The Clintons? George Soros?
It makes no difference. As a duly registered nonprofit, Friends of Lackawanna is bound by IRS rules for the collection and disbursement of its money.
The real issues are those raised by Friends of Lackawanna in its appeal: that the expansion infringes upon the community’s constitutional right to “clean air, pure water and the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment.”
That wording is from Article I, Section 27 of the Pennsylvania Constitution, the Environmental Rights Amendment that voters approved in 1971 by a 4-1 margin.
In its Keystone decision, the DEP has taken that constitutional mandate as a mere suggestion. Ideally, the Environmental Hearing Board will give it more serious consideration, regardless of who contributes to Friends of Lackawanna.
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