Attorneys and Du Page County officials are discussing a proposed settlement that could keep two landfills on Forest Preserve District property open for as many as 10 more years.
Meanwhile, the trial to determine the shutdown date for the dumps has been delayed at least a week.
The plan under discussion apparently would accelerate the rate of dumping at the landfills, possibly by increasing the amount of garbage from outside the county, thereby mandating that the county find some other way to dispose of its own trash within a decade.
”I hope this will motivate the County Board`s Solid Waste Committee to act,” Ray Soden, a County Board member and president of the Forest Preserve District, said of the proposed agreement.
”I hope we can move in the direction of recycling and other programs . . . so that when the landfills do shut down, we`ll have an alternative ready to roll.”
The two landfills are the only public garbage dumps in Du Page. Virtually all of the waste generated in the county winds up at either the facility in the Greene Valley Forest Preserve, near Naperville, or the one in Mallard Lake Forest Preserve, near Hanover Park.
The landfills receive about 40 percent of their garbage from outside the county, and that proportion would rise to about half if the dumps are to be filled to their designed capacity in eight to 10 years, according to Wallace Brown, a member of the County Board and chairman of the Forest Preserve`s Landfill Committee.
On Monday, 14 attorneys, representing the various positions and points of view in what long has been a controversial issue, appeared in Du Page Circuit Court at a hearing that lasted only about 15 minutes.
They asked Circuit Judge John W. Darrah to grant a two-week continuance, but the judge gave them one week.
The case involves a suit filed in 1990 by Du Page County State`s Atty. James E. Ryan and the Illinois attorney general`s office seeking orders to close the two landfills.
Darrah ruled March 23 that the district lacked the legal authority to operate landfills, but he said the dumps might be permitted to remain open anyway after further hearings, if he determined their immediate closure would cause great harm to the public good.
The proposed compromise would allow both landfills to operate until 2000. But forest preserve officials want the Greene Valley site to remain open until 2002.
Until Darrah`s order in March, the county had planned to keep the dumps open for 20 more years, but compromise discussions became more serious as Monday`s court date approached.
”The attorney general and our office made it clear all along that immediate closing would not be in anybody`s interest,” George Sotos, head of the state`s attorney`s civil division, said after the hearing. ”The question has been, `How long should they be allowed to remain open?` ”
