Last July I wrote about a proposed landfill in Waller County near Hempstead and the residents who are fighting against it. The Statesman has an update on the story.
In many ways, the landfill fight in this rural Texas town two hours east of Austin has a standard shape: An out-of-state corporation is accused of siting an unsightly dump near a largely poor, largely minority community. The landfill company says the accusations are unfair and that the dump will contribute jobs to a stricken area.
The twist here is one of the background players.
Glenn Shankle — the former executive director of the state environmental agency and a lobbyist for landfill companies himself, including one whose permit for a radioactive waste dump he controversially supported just before leaving said agency — is now a hired gun for the community.
Unlikely as the partnership may be, Shankle, 59, hobbled by old track injuries suffered as a runner at then-Kealing Junior High School, may be the opposition’s best hope.
In Shankle’s telling, over a breakfast of heavily buttered toast, bacon and a Dr Pepper in downtown Austin, he resisted the community group gig when first approached about it.
“I told them at the time I don’t do protest work,” he said.
He had grown leery, after a career at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, of the methods of environmental groups, he said, and was unsure that he could fight a landfill while also serving as a landfill lobbyist.
“Once you predominantly do industry work, it puts you in an awkward situation,” he said.
Having survived some health scares, however, he had been casting about how he ought to fulfill God’s plan, as he put it. Then, family members who had attended Prairie View A&M University, a historically black college eight miles outside of Hempstead, opposed the landfill and pressed him to intervene.
“I slept on it and prayed on it,” he said. His conclusion: Prairie View should not suffer because of a “scar” to the landscape.
[…]
Landfill company Green Group Holdings CEO Ernest Kaufmann said no more than 250 acres of the 723-acre site will be dedicated to the landfill, which will hold municipal waste from a 40-mile radius around the landfill — with an eye to serving the ever-growing Houston market. Kaufmann said its operation could last roughly 40 years.
“We’re not taking hazardous waste. We’re not taking sewage sludge,” said Kaufmann, whose company calls the project Pintail. The rest of the land might be used for ranching, recreational purposes, as an industrial park or left as open space. The company, which says it will invest millions of dollars in the project, has proposed paying fees to Waller County for each ton of waste collected and a donation of $150,000 for county fire safety equipment.
It estimates the project will create at least 20 full-time jobs at the landfill.
“This is not in a disadvantaged neighborhood,” he continued. “What you have here is some very wealthy people stirring that up. We pay a lot of attention to where we locate facilities and who we’re impacting and who we’re not impacting.”
Huntsinger and others are skeptical of the company’s pledges because, they say, Green Group could sell its permit.
Huntsinger is Bill Huntsinger, a retired Houston real estate guy who moved to Hempstead and is funding the Stop Highway 6 Landfill effort. Green Group has an array of high-priced lobbyists working for it, and rather to my surprise has hired environmental lawyer Jim Blackburn as a consultant. The main thing I get from this story is that the process hasn’t advanced much in the past year and may not advance any further this year, as consideration of the landfill application may happen in 2013. I said last time and I’ll say again, I think this is a bad idea. We shouldn’t be in the business of building more landfills, we should be in the business of waste reduction so that we don’t need more landfills. I wish I had faith that the TCEQ would give this a very critical review, but I don’t. I fear we’ll eventually be stuck with it.
i need a little favor from all of you landfill people near the city of greenville texas, please and thank you. i lost something by accident in last week’s garbage batch that supposedly gets hauled away every wednesday from the greenville texas area to the paris texas landfill, i guess. i will pay the landfill for the return of last week’s batch that is supposedly hauled to the paris texas landfill every wednesday, from the greenville texas area if need be! please let me know texas landfill people, and then get back to me please and thank you!