A public hearing for amending the Amite County Solid Waste Management Plan to add a proposed 195-acre landfill is set for 9 a.m. Monday, April 3.
Residents are invited to voice their support of or opposition to the solid waste disposal site to Amite supervisors at the hearing to be held at the courthouse in Liberty.
The site, owned by Don Alford, is located off Womack Road, and if permitted, will include 195 acres of disposal area within a 555-acre site around the Mars Hill community of Amite County.
A legal notice for the public hearing states that the service area for the site will include a 100-mile radius of the property. It would accept waste not only from Amite County, but Adams, Wilkinson, Franklin, Lincoln, Pike and Walthall counties, as well as two Louisiana parishes.
Already the possible waste site has resulted in calls to supervisors against the project, and one group in Mars Hill is organizing to oppose the waste site.
Kevin Wells, who has been a spokesman for the Mars Hill group, said residents plan to meet at 7 p.m. March 20 at the Mars Hill Community Center to discuss their opposition.
Wells, who is an adjacent landowner, is concerned about landfill runoff.
“Runoff from dry creek beds goes directly into the Amite River and Tangipahoa. This area is the headway of both of those rivers,” Wells said, adding that he worries waste and chemicals will find their way into the rivers’ tributaries.
“This is half a mile north of my home,” he said. “I’m dead center south of it. The Northeast Amite Water Association and well is 3 miles due south of it.”
Wells’ group has concerns about contamination of aquifers.
He said the northeast area is the fastest-growing area of Amite County.
“Retirees are moving there into a lower tax district,” he said.
The group hasn’t taken any legal action, but Wells said it is in the process of hiring an environmental attorney to speak on their behalf if necessary.
Landowner Alford appeared before Amite supervisors last summer and spoke to them in executive session about an industrial prospect.
He said he’s been working on the permit process for about a year and has spent some $40,000 getting soil tests, test wells, engineer reports and other advance work done.
Alford said he was told the soil tests showed the property was “an anomaly.”
“They said, ‘This is the most perfect site they had ever seen,’ for a landfill, Alford said. “We’ve done our homework on this thing.”
Alford, who owns Amite Poles and Piling in Gloster, bought the property in 1999 and it has been for sale since 2002.
“I started noticing these garbage trucks going from Liberty to Natchez,” Alford said of the vehicles that haul garbage to a regional landfill in the Sibley community near Natchez. “I thought if we had something like that here it would save us money.”
For those who fear the smell of a landfill, Alford said it wouldn’t be as bad as the county’s 100-plus chicken houses, which can be foul.
“We’ve got a large footprint, and we’re not trying to hide anything,” Alford said. “We’re a couple of years down the road (from opening a landfill).”
He said he’s working with the Department of Environmental Quality, making sure everything is being done “by the book.”
“The DEQ is very regulated,” Alford said.
Alford believes the landfill could save some counties money and having a landfill nearby may attract industry. He gave the Nissan plant as an example of a major business that’s located not far from a landfill.
He hopes landfill detractors will do their own homework and even visit the Sibley landfill site themselves.
“You would not know there’s a landfill there” just by driving by, “unless you already knew it.”
Still, he understands the knee-jerk reaction to a large landfill.
“Everybody wants their garbage taken away but nobody wants it” nearby, Alford said.
Amite County District 4 Supervisor Butch Graves, who expects a sizeable crowd at the public hearing on April 3, said after the board meeting this week that supervisors will have the final say on whether to amend the agreement to add the landfill.
The county waste plan is available for review from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday at the courthouse.
Written comments may be mailed to the Amite County Chancery Clerk’s office, P.O. Box 680, Liberty, MS 39645 or delivered to the chancery clerk’s office through 5 p.m. Friday, March 24.
The proposed plan addresses:
• Plans for residential garbage collection and disposal.
• Solid waste management facilities that will be used.
• Local provisions for wastes generated by businesses and industries.
• Management of special wastes — tires, electronics, municipal water sludge, some medical wastes, disaster debris, industrial waste and bulky wastes.
• Illegal dumping.
• Plans for reducing and recycling wastes.
• Public costs of the waste system and manner of financing.
• A schedule of continued work to meet waste needs.
