Owners of a 10-acre site off Jeff Davis Road at the heart of a contentious process in the 1990s to turn it into a landfill are asking the state to reissue a permit to do so.
A public hearing is set for 7 p.m. Oct. 9 at Warren Central High School’s auditorium before the permit board of the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality to discuss the construction and operation of the W.T. Ewell landfill, according to a public notice from the state environmental agency. A request to reissue the permit was filed by Warren County Waste Disposal Inc.
The site is about 10 miles south-southeast of Vicksburg, at 5688 Jeff Davis Road. If approved by DEQ, the action would reissue the municipal solid waste landfill permit to authorize building and operating the disposal area in compliance with non-hazardous solid waste management regulations. It would operate as a “Subtitle D” landfill if approved for a re-issuance. It was unclear how much Warren County’s decision last year to bid out garbage collection to a single hauler would affect the permit. Waste Management won the contract and is now the sole waste collection service in Vicksburg and Warren County. Supervisors received a copy of the notice this past week and vowed to renew their opposition, saying the issue was all moot because residential waste was trucked to approved landfills in Monroe, Natchez and elsewhere even when family-run haulers were permitted.
A phone call this past week to a cellphone number DEQ attributed to the landfill owners was not returned. Ewell died in 2002, but the firm’s most recent annual report filed with the Secretary of State’s Office shows Ewell’s wife, Betty, and local attorney Paul Kelly Loyacono have remained as partners in the venture, with Loyacono as treasurer.
A saga of permits, lawsuits, opposition and legal maneuvers began in 1986 when the patriarch Ewell was issued a permit by DEQ in 1986 and sought to expand the site. Partnering in the venture were Ewell, who died in 2002, his wife, Betty, and Vicksburg attorney Paul Kelly Loyacono. No household garbage was accepted at the site then or now, as opposition grew among the general public and on the Warren County Board of Supervisors. Ewell sued the board in 1996 after supervisors at first denied a public hearing required before the site could expand, thus putting the kibosh on amending the county’s solid waste ordinance. The city and county had operated two landfills before a comprehensive round of state and federal environmental regulations went into effect in 1991.
Hearings were finally held on expanding the permitted area, in 1996, 1998 and 2003. At the third hearing, all 100 or so people in attendance opposed the plan, citing potentially lower property values and poorer road conditions from truck traffic, among other reasons. Later that same year, the DEQ permit board allowed the firm to start construction, a move Warren County appealed in court. In August 2005, Holmes County Chancellor Janace Harvey Goree ruled in favor of landfill owners, saying the site was OK’d by the state before new regulatory statutes were passed and that new laws cannot be applied retroactively. Goree was appointed to hear the case by the state Supreme Court after all three judges in the Ninth Chancery District recused themselves.
Since then, only yard waste and construction debris has been collected on the site.
Comments on the current application will be taken and entered into the official record, DEQ says in its latest public notice. Any appeals of the permit board’s decision must be filed in chancery court.
Those who want to comment in writing in advance of the October hearing may contact Charity Rockingham of DEQ’s permits division chief for its mining and solid waste management branch at Mississippi Environmental Quality Permit Board, P.O. Box 2261, Jackson, MS, 39225. The phone number for any additional information is 601-961-5171.
Copies of the proposed draft permit is available on DEQ’s website, at http://opc.deq.state.ms.us/publicnotice.aspx.