Friends of Lackawanna asked the state Environmental Hearing Board to revoke the landfill's 40-year expansion approval.
BY FRANK WILKES LESNEFSKY STAFF WRITER
In a bid to prevent the Keystone Sanitary Landfill from accepting 188 billion pounds of garbage over the next 40 years, landfill opponents appealed to the state Environmental Hearing Board this week to revoke Keystone’s expansion approval.
Citing leachate management, groundwater pollution, compliance issues, governmental oversight, odors, visual impacts, property values and other issues, attorneys for Friends of Lackawanna, a grassroots group formed in 2014 in opposition of the landfill and its expansion, filed an appeal with the hearing board Monday.
The hearing board is an independent, quasi-judicial agency made up of five full-time, governor-appointed judges who have jurisdiction to hold hearings and rule on orders, permits, licenses and decisions of the state Department of Environmental Protection, according to Pennsylvania’s 1988 Environmental Hearing Board Act.
The appeal requests that the hearing board vacates the DEP’s June 3 decision approving a major permit modification for the landfill in Dunmore and Throop’s Phase II expansion. The expansion allows the Louis and Dominick DeNaples-owned landfill to continue hauling in waste for the next four decades, totaling 94 billion tons through 2060. Under its modified permit, Keystone now has the capacity to triple its volume of trash.
“The approval of the Phase III major modification of the KSL landfill is inconsistent with, and unreasonably infringes on the community’s constitutional right to clean air, pure water and the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment,” attorney Mark L. Freed of Doylestown-based Curtin & Heefner LLP wrote in the appeal. “Furthermore, the approval fails to protect the air and water natural resources in the area for the benefit of the community and future generations.”
DEP spokeswoman Colleen Connolly acknowledged the appeal but said she could not provide additional comment.
“The DEP is aware of an appeal filed by Friends of Lackawanna with the Environmental Hearing Board regarding the department’s decision to issue a major permit modification to Keystone Landfill for its Phase III expansion in Lackawanna County,” she said in an email. “This is now a matter of litigation, so the DEP will have no further comment.”
Monday’s appeal is the second time Friends of Lackawanna has challenged the landfill before the Environmental Hearing Board.
The group appealed the DEP’s renewal of the landfill’s operating permit in 2015. In 2017, the hearing board decided not to rescind the landfill’s operating permit, though it did require Keystone to prepare a groundwater assessment plan because of contamination a monitoring well had detected for 15 years.
Landfill consultant Al Magnotta argued that the allegations in the new appeal are the same as the allegations the hearing board rejected in 2017. In a written statement, Magnotta questioned the source of Friends of Lackawanna’s funding for its legal fees.
He pointed out that the group petitioned to be reimbursed for nearly $800,000 in legal fees following the 2017 ruling, and the board awarded them $17,801. He cited their tax exemption filings with the Internal Revenue Service that showed $262,219 in funding from 2014 through 2018.
“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.
Pat Clark, a leader of Friends of Lackawanna, said they know the rules of nonprofit filings and follow them accordingly.
“It never ceases to amaze me how the landfill likes to focus on the nonsubstantive issues, and our funding is just another example of that,” he said. “They’re a billion dollar corporation wondering how a 100% volunteer-based nonprofit organization is fighting them. I take that as a compliment.”
Clark said that while they are using many of the same arguments as their previous appeal, the standards are different when appealing an operating permit compared to appealing the expansion.
He said one of the hearing board’s core findings in 2017 was that there was no record for the DEP to use to deny the landfill’s permit because the DEP had “failed in its obligation to inspect, enforce and record violations.”
In the board’s 2017 decision, Judge Bernard Labuskes Jr. — who is also assigned to the 2021 appeal — wrote, “The (DEP) relies upon formal, memorialized violations in conducting its review of Keystone’s compliance history, but the department, with rare exceptions, never memorializes any of Keystone’s violations.”
“Since then, all they’ve done is find problems, and all we’ve done is help uncover more problems,” Clark said. “A lot of those same issues have magnified, and all of those issues will exponentially magnify if this expansion is allowed.”
Unintentionally coinciding with Friends of Lackawanna’s appeal, political activist Gene Stilp, a Northeast Pennsylvania native who now lives near Harrisburg, held a protest outside of the landfill Wednesday morning. Stilp, who described himself as a longtime opponent of landfills, said Dunmore police cited him for obstructing garbage trucks trying to enter the landfill.
“I think it’s important to put your actions where your beliefs are — that’s why I came up today,” he said. “It was an honor to support the efforts to block the expansion.”