[7/26/04]Warren County has appealed state approval of a plan for a landfill in Yokena, and a special judge has been appointed to hear the case.

Judge Janace Harvey-Goree of Lexington has been appointed by the state Supreme Court to hear the case.

Her appointment was made March 17, after all three chancellors for the district that includes Warren County recused themselves.

“It is in the best interest of all concerned” that the local chancellors recuse themselves “as the issues before this court involve an attorney who practices in this district and the board of supervisors who approves the court’s budget,” wrote chancellors Vicki Roach Barnes, Jane Weathersby and Marie Wilson in January.

The county government’s appeal was filed in Warren County Chancery Court in early November.

The landfill is planned for property of the W.T. Ewell family near Jeff Davis Road, in southern Warren County. The company that would develop the site, Warren County Waste Disposal Inc., is represented by Vicksburg attorney Paul Kelly Loyacono.

The board of supervisors’ attorney is Randy Sherard of Vicksburg. The appeal Sherard filed on behalf of the county asks the chancery court to reverse an Oct. 14 decision of the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality Permit Board.

That decision gave the green light to Waste Disposal’s plan, reversing the permit board’s own decision of four months earlier.

County boards instead of the state-regulatory agency generally decide such matters. This case is different, however, since the owners of the property, Betty Ewell and Loyacono, have held a permit for the landfill since before major changes in environmental law took effect in 1991.

The site was previously approved by the state and added by supervisors to the county’s comprehensive waste-handling ordinance. But it was not developed, and new legal requirements now in effect would make the application process more stringent.

The October motion to appeal was made by Bill Lauderdale, then the supervisor for the district in which the planned landfill area lies, District 4. His motion passed 3-1, with board president Charles Selmon of District 3 dissenting.

Lauderdale’s successor in the post, Supervisor Carl Flanders, has also spoken against the landfill.

Residents of the landfill area have protested that any landfill would change the character of their neighborhood, creating truck traffic with the road-wear and noise and air pollution it brings and the risk of pollution from leakage from the landfill itself.

The permit board’s decision has left Waste Disposal free to begin construction, with any investment subject to loss if the company lost the case on appeal.

Loyacono said the company had done much preliminary work on the site and was ready to move quickly to establish the landfill, but that it would probably not do so before the litigation has been settled.

Records of the MDEQ proceedings have been sent to Harvey-Goree, with whom attorneys are expected to file briefs during the next several weeks.