Laredo Officials on Record in Opposition to Huge Waste Dump
Laredo Officials on Record in Opposition to Huge Waste Dump
Posted May 23rd, 2016 @ 4:42am
Opposition is growing to a controversial proposal to construct one of the largest landfills in the nation on a ranch north of Laredo, News Radio 1200 WOAI reports.
A citizens group called Citizens Against Laredo Landfill, or CALL, has convinced both the Laredo City Council and the Webb County Commission to pass resolutions of opposition to the nearly 1,000 acre site, which would be built near Highway 59 and adjacent to a main railroad line north of the city.
City Councilman George Altgelt told News Radio 1200 WOAI one thing that worries his constituents is how the trash, including hazardous waste, will get to the facility.
“If approved, a lot of the regional waste coming in from Mexico will be coming into the city of Laredo either by rail car or via overland commercial carrier,” Altgelt said.
Developer C.Y. Benavides, whose family owns the property where the landfill would be located, told News Radio 1200 WOAI a number of geologists have certified that the stone and clay that make up the area make it a perfect site to safely house waste for decades.
“If waste is created someplace else and we can store it safely, shouldn’t we do that,” he asked. “And aren’t we tired of having ‘backyard landfills’ in every county and community?”
Benavides says his plan would be to build 960 acre site which can hold more than 220 million cubic yards of waste materials, including industrial waste, from an 800 mile radius, meaning it could house material from as far away as St. Louis and Mexico City.
“TCEQ has said it would potentially license another facility south of San Antonio and west of Corpus Christi,” he said. “This could potentially be the last facility needed for the entire state of Texas.”
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has given the project a tentative approval, but Altgelt and CALL members are urging the TCEQ to hold a hearing in Laredo and hear directly from residents.
Altgelt says the landfill would be located ‘upwind’ from Laredo and people would have to smell it, not to mention the fact that the facility is in the Hundred Year Flood plain, which means expensive dams and dykes would have to be built to keep the notoriously unpredictable Rio Grande from washing up the waste.
“Nobody has the right chemically trespass on your body,” he said. “It is a health and safety concern more than anything else.”
Several Laredo residents have also raised the specter of ‘environmental racism,’ saying even though their community is mostly Hispanic doesn’t mean it needs to be the ‘waste dump to North America.’
WOAI PHOTO
Read more: http://woai.iheart.com/articles/local-news-119078/laredo-officials-on-record-in-opposition-14739181/#ixzz49UFFuh8H