For many in the courtroom, a judge’s promise Friday that the Waller County landfill trial would conclude “before Santa Claus comes” was welcome news. Earlier in the week, they had lamented the possibility that the trial – one over an issue that has divided the rural county for the past two years – would pause and not conclude until February, due to a crowded court calendar.
Yet both the landfill developer’s attorney and members of incoming county commissioners agree that whatever the verdict, the controversy over the proposed 250-acre waste site will be far from over.
“Whatever happens,” Pintail Landfill attorney Brent Ryan said Friday, “we’re going to move forward with the project.”
County Judge-elect Trey Duhon, a landfill opponent, agreed.
“The end of this trial is not the end of the story,” Duhon said.
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Whatever the jury decides – the trial is now expected to continue through Tuesday, pause, and then resume again on Dec. 16 – it is unlikely that Waller County will be left with definitive answers.
The reasons are twofold.
Ryan, Pintail’s attorney, said that the company will proceed with the project regardless of whether the jury invalidates Waller County’s 2013 landfill ordinance and host agreement. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, not the county, has the final say over the landfill, and the commission is still reviewing Pintail’s permit application. That proposal is expected to be reviewed in a contested case hearing this summer, commission spokeswoman Andrea Morrow said.
If the state commission were to approve the project and Waller County’s ordinance were invalidated, Ryan said Pintail would be free to develop the project – it just wouldn’t have to provide Hempstead or the county with benefits that had been agreed to.
See here for the background. Originally, the trial was expected to conclude in February due to a crammed court calendar, so I suppose a December conclusion counts as good news. The thought that this won’t settle the matter of whether the landfill can be built or not, and that the decision rests with the TCEQ, is rather unsettling. I’m not exactly sure how that is, but whatever. The point is, one way or the other this fight will go on.