Illinois’ tough procedure for reviewing proposed landfills, incinerators and garbage transfer stations is unconstitutional, a federal judge in East St. Louis has ruled.
The ruling by U.S. District Court Judge William L. Beatty throws into doubt how the state should consider future garbage-disposal projects and the role citizens will be allowed to play in the process.
And environmentalists worry that, unless the ruling is appealed or the law is changed, a rash of landfill and incinerator proposals will result.
Four companies that haul or handle garbage challenged a 1981 state law following a controversy last year over their role in train shipments of New York garbage that ended up sitting-and rotting-near East St. Louis.
The law requires that waste-handling and disposal facilities pass both a local and state review, a stringent procedure in comparison with other states that put sole authority for approving such projects in the hands of an appointed panel or governmental agency.
But the law establishes slightly different procedures for the local review depending on the area that the facility is meant to serve.
If the waste site is for the use of a wide region beyond the boundaries of the city or county in which it is to be located, the law calls for a special public hearing. If it is only for local garbage, the law says the project is to be reviewed through a city’s or county’s normal zoning procedure.
That distinction interferes with interstate commerce, Beatty ruled, since a regional site could take garbage from another state. Under the Constitution, only the federal government may regulate interstate trade.
“The defendants (state agencies) have offered no proof that garbage generated outside the boundaries of any local unit of government poses any different health risks to the public than garbage generated locally,” Beatty wrote in his Oct. 27 opinion, which state officials learned of late Monday.
Beatty cited a 1992 Supreme Court case involving a Michigan landfill in which the court said states could not interfere with imported garbage from other states except under tightly defined circumstances, which the Illinois law did not meet.
Joanna Hoelscher of Chicago’s Citizens for a Better Environment, which has used the state review process to oppose several area landfill and incinerator projects, said the ruling would encourage more such proposals.
Illinois Environmental Protection Agency official Dave Engel said the state has not yet decided whether to appeal the ruling or try to amend the law to make it constitutional. But the state does not want to abandon local review of landfills and other trash-related projects.
