Warren County resident Nell Ryan speaks during the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality’s public hearing concerning a proposed landfill off Jeff Davis Road. About 100 people attended the hearing Thursday night at Battlefield Inn, mostly speaking against the proposal.(C. Todd Sherman/The Vicksburg Post)

Yokena-area residents on Thursday told staff of the state pollution control agency they do not want a long-proposed household-waste landfill near their homes.

Twenty-one of the 100 or so people who attended the public hearing made comments to staff of the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality. All opposed the plan to create a 10-acre garbage landfill on private land off Jeff Davis Road.

“The property values there are people that have lived and worked all their lives and everything they have is on that end of town won’t be worth anything when that dump gets here,” said Robert Pell, also chief of the LeTourneau Volunteer Fire Department.

Vicksburg attorney Paul Kelly Loyacono and Betty Ewell are partners in a proposal to create the landfill that would be the county’s first since before 1990 to accept household waste. Their company, Warren County Waste Disposal Inc., has held a permit for such a project since 1986, but the land remains undeveloped.

“We wouldn’t be doing it if there wasn’t a need for it,” Loyacono said. “In the long run, it will be an asset.”

MDEQ will also be accepting written comments until Jan. 30. The earlier deadline had been Jan. 9.

Household waste from Warren County is now trucked to landfills outside the county, including at least one in Louisiana.

Now that the partners have decided to develop the site, the decision has come before the MDEQ’s permitting board.

The permit was issued with no expiration date, but federal and state environmental laws have changed since it was issued. Waste Disposal’s pending request is for reissuance and a permit for the site’s proposed handling of storm water runoff, MDEQ environmental permits division chief Jerry W. Cain said.

Warren County officials have backed a full, new permit process, saying the abbreviated process is insufficient.

A major change in landfill-permitting rules came in 1991, when the Solid Waste Management Authority Act was passed, MDEQ attorney Roy Furrh said. That act requires all new landfills to be part of overall county waste-management plans, and it gives county boards of supervisors veto power over the development of new landfills.

As a previously permitted landfill, however, “our staff feels that this is considered an existing facility, and therefore the planning act would not have effect,” Furrh said of the site south of Vicksburg.

District 4 Supervisor Bill Lauderdale, whose district includes the landfill site, told MDEQ officials Thursday that local, not state, officials should decide. “The officials in the county should be the ones to say yes or not,” Lauderdale said.

Opponents said a landfill would bring unwanted additional truck traffic through residential neighborhoods.

“The only way to the landfill is through the neighborhoods,” said Kebby Rider of the routes from U.S. 61 to the landfill along Jeff Davis and Redbone roads, about 10 miles south of downtown Vicksburg. A landfill already off Jeff Davis Road accepts only yard waste and construction debris.

Others expressed concern over the additional air and noise pollution more trucks would create.

Residents also expressed their concern over water pollution from any leakage that could come from a landfill on the site, which is the highest in the area. Small amounts of the hazardous materials that naturally accompany household waste are permitted in such landfills, Cain said.

“There’s no such thing a failsafe landfill,” Henry Muirhead said. “They’re going to leak.”

MDEQ solid waste management and mining specialist Billy Warden said, however, that he did not know of any leakage from landfills built in the state since updated federal standards took effect in the early-1990s.