A Dunmore councilwoman sent Gov. Josh Shapiro a letter Wednesday urging him to add stricter penalties to the Keystone Sanitary Landfill’s remanded Phase III expansion while also raising concerns over the role of a state Department of Environmental Protection supervisor who concluded the expansion’s benefits outweigh its harms.
Dunmore council President Janet Brier, who emphasized she wrote the letter as a Dunmore citizen and not as a representative of council, sent Shapiro the letter in response to the Pennsylvania Environmental Hearing Board’s decision Tuesday to send the landfill’s 42.4-year Phase III expansion permit approval back to the DEP to potentially address issues with odors and leachate generation. As the culmination of a nearly 4-year-old legal battle brought by grassroots landfill opposition group Friends of Lackawanna, environmental judges ruled Tuesday that the department erred in issuing the Louis and Dominick DeNaples-owned landfill’s Phase III expansion permit in June 2021, which allows the landfill in Dunmore and Throop to triple its volume of waste through the 2060s by hauling in just over 94 million tons of additional garbage, or about 188 billion pounds.
“The Environmental Hearing Board’s order confirms the DEP knew that KSL could not contain the leachate that it was already producing, yet they approved the permit for 94 million more tons of garbage to be dumped on our region,” Brier said in a phone interview Thursday. “One can only conclude that DEP is either grossly negligent or that political influence prevailed over science.”
The DEP did not respond by press time Thursday to emailed requests for comment on Brier’s letter. Brier did not include her council title in her letter.
In their 74-page decision, the five judges who make up the Environmental Hearing Board said the landfill has experienced challenges controlling offsite odors and excess leachate generation at its facility for several years, and the DEP knew about those issues prior to approving the expansion.
“The Department erred in issuing a permit that does not sufficiently control or mitigate these issues,” the judges wrote. “The Department must assess on remand whether additional measures to control odors and leachate, some of which have been required by a recent Consent Order and Agreement, warrant inclusion in the landfill’s permit or changes to the landfill’s operating plans.”
Harms vs. benefits
Brier took issue with the Environmental Hearing Board’s findings regarding a July 2019 environmental assessment by the DEP that weighed 15 known and potential harms, with accompanying mitigation measures, of approving the landfill’s Phase III expansion against eight benefits.
The harms included visual impacts, odors, litter, noise, vectors/birds, traffic, runoff, air quality and groundwater impacts. The benefits were: environmental education, continuation of recycling and cleanup programs, goods and services, continued employment for 145 full-time workers, tax revenue, participation in Pennsylvania’s Adopt a Highway Program and financial benefits for Dunmore and Throop from their host agreements.
A section titled “Excess Leachate Generation” under groundwater impacts determined that “it is apparent KSL continues to have an issue with either excessive leachate generation and/or infiltration into the leachate conveyance system.”
“KSL continues to have current flow amounts not only higher than what was predicted for the current landfill, but also higher than what was predicted as a maximum peak flow for the proposed Phase III expansion,” according to the analysis.
In its ruling, the Environmental Hearing Board wrote that Erika Bloxham, a facility specialist in the DEP’s waste management program in the Northeast region who was tasked with completing the analysis, concluded that the benefits did not outweigh the harms, primarily because, in her opinion, Keystone had not mitigated the excess leachate production to the fullest extent possible.
Her supervisor said otherwise.
“However, Ms. Bloxham’s supervisor, Roger Bellas, the waste program manager for the Northeast region, disagreed and authored the conclusion of the analysis for the Department,” the judges wrote.
The analysis concluded, “DEP has determined that KSL has demonstrated that the benefits to the public from the project clearly outweigh the known and potential harms.”
In her analysis, Bloxham pointed to the landfill resorting to hauling excess leachate offsite and adding temporary leachate storage. She said the landfill’s excess leachate flows increase the potential for it to have overflows and other incidents that could impact groundwater, though on Wednesday, landfill consultant Al Magnotta said Keystone has never been close to overflowing.
Despite Bloxham’s concerns, the judges said, “The Department concluded that Keystone’s current and proposed efforts to isolate and mitigate excessive leachate generation were expected to limit the number, duration, and intensity of future excessive leachate flows.”
The landfill is required to keep its leachate below 25% of its maximum 9.7-million-gallon capacity, but from May 2021 through April 2024, it exceeded that at least 20 out of 36 months, according to the ruling. The DEP cited Keystone last year for exceeding the maximum limit every month from October 2023 through June.
The landfill’s leachate generation is also more than double what it predicted, averaging 282,676 gallons per day, and nearly 8.2 million gallons per month — enough leachate to fill about 12 Olympic-sized pools each month.
Brier’s letter
Brier criticized Bellas’ role in her letter.
“Throughout its existence, KSL has never been able to mitigate the excess leachate production for any length of time, yet the order remands the permit back to the very people who overrode the waste management facility specialist’s conclusion that the benefits do not outweigh the harms,” Brier wrote. “(Roger Bellas) still holds the position of Environmental Program Manager in the Waste Management Department in the Northeast Regional Office. I think it is fair to say that his mind is made up.”
Brier contended Northeast Pennsylvania has been “subjected to malodors, insufficient leachate containment, methane flare offs, out-of-state truck traffic and indifference to all of this by the Department of Environmental Protection.” She said conditions have worsened at the landfill since its expansion approval, and the DEP’s response was inadequate.
Brier also criticized the department’s odor reporting process, describing an after-hours voicemail that tells callers to “stay on the line if it is an emergency.” She asked the DEP to remove “emergency” from the message to avoid callers hanging up because they don’t consider an odor an emergency.
“The whole process places the burden of reporting on the very people who are suffering from pervasive odors in their homes, their schools, playgrounds, churches, athletic facilities and in their children’s bedrooms,” she wrote.
She contended there are minimal consequences for noncompliance. Last year, in March 2024, the DEP levied its largest fine for the landfill at $575,000. The civil penalty was the culmination of 14 odor-related violations since January 2023, close to 1,000 odor complaints in seven months and at least 70 instances of DEP staff detecting offsite landfill gas and leachate odors attributed to Keystone.
“There needs to be substantial penalties for noncompliance,” Brier wrote. “Otherwise, the result will be the same harmful decisions.”
Brier also called for a reduced duration of the expansion, bringing it from 40 years to 10 years, calling four decades absurd.
The expansion approval was an “egregious transgression,” Brier said, adding that the responsibility rests on past administrations.
“My only hope is that the Shapiro administration will permanently reverse DEP’s prior decisions and finally put the people’s health and well being before politics,” Brier said. “The Environmental Hearing Board’s remand order presents a tremendous opportunity for Gov. Shapiro to reverse the mistakes of the past.”