By Suzanne Sprague
NORTH TEXAS – Suzanne Sprague, KERA 90.1 Reporter: Mary Jean Bridgefarmer has lived in her house near Highway 380 in Collin County for 40 years. She and her late husband raised a family among the farms of this once-quiet area 30 miles north of Dallas and watched as it became increasingly crowded with industry and traffic.
[Ambient sound: highway noise]
Mary Jean Bridgefarmer, Collin County resident: There's a lot of traffic in and out, and at night sometimes at 12 or 1 o'clock there'll be, I'll say, from 5 to 10 people, trucks or cars. I don't know what goes on over there.
Sprague: Bridgefarmer is pointing to the recycling facility just down the street from her house. She says the machines there are so noisy they wake her up at night and sometimes rattle her dishes. There's also a rock quarry and a gun range right across Highway 380 from her home. And now, a private company wants to open a 146-acre landfill right next to the quarry. The facility would be the first site solely for construction debris in Collin County.
Rita Beving, Sierra Club: It was amazing to us that someone would want to put in a landfill on the banks of the East Fork, in a floodplain, over an aquifer, just five miles upstream from Lake Lavon, which is a drinking source for over a million people.
Sprague: Rita Beving is with the Sierra Club. She's working with Collin County residents who want the state to deny a permit for the proposed landfill. Among Beving's environmental concerns is the fear that contaminated runoff from the landfill would end up in Lake Lavon, something developers say is impossible. Still, it worries Mary Jean Bridgefarmer, who also thinks her middle-income, rural neighborhood is being taken advantage of.
Bridgefarmer: Looks like they're putting all the dump and the trash east of McKinney. You won't see that west of McKinney like Stonebridge or anything like that. They wouldn't dare let it be out there. But they know they can do it out here, I guess.
Sprague: Environmentalists have been active in a number of rural industry cases lately, including the construction of a cement plant in Whiteright, a new landfill in Melissa, and a number of new power plants north of Dallas. These events have the Sierra Club's Rita Beving and others worried that the front line for environmental justice battles is moving to areas where industry opponents will find it harder to fight.
Beving: Sometimes when you talk about environmental justice issues, it doesn't have to apply to minorities. It also applies to rural areas - areas where there are less people, or people who are less likely to fight such an entity, because of their income or because there are actually less people.
Sprague: Princeton, Texas, is one such area. It's a town of 3,000 people, four miles east of the proposed McKinney landfill. Mayor Kathy Davis is afraid her mostly-rural community will become the dumping ground for construction debris from other cities.
Kathy Davis, Mayor of Princeton: I'm afraid that it will, because we do have some open space here. We embrace the growth, but we don't want the garbage from other communities to be shoved down our throats either. I think the line has been drawn in the sand, and it's time that we stood up with some backbone and said, "No more."
Sprague: Princeton is one of several Collin County cities that have written letters to the state, in opposition to the proposed landfill. The Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commissioners will soon decide whether to grant a contested case hearing, the first step in denying a landfill permit. However, the state can only consider environmental issues, not quality of life concerns. It is this battle over quality of life that has frustrated Wise County resident Sallie Heise in her ongoing struggle with industrial pollution near her home.
[Ambient sound of walking among leaves]
Sallie Heise, Wise County Resident: You see the peanuts right down there? As many as there are? It looks like snow down there. I got to pick all that up.
Sprague: The creek on Heise's property is littered with foam packing peanuts that have blown over from the junk yard and recycling center next door, which opened in 1998. She and her husband Russell planted four rows of trees to block the sight of 25-foot high trash mounds. It didn't work. They can still see everything from old telephone poles to, literally, a kitchen sink.
Russell Heise, Wise County resident: It's an eyesore, and we have all the trash out there. It is a health hazard. It is a haven for rats and things like that and the constant noise. He's in there day and night. Sometimes he's in there in the middle of the night, dumping at two or three in the morning, big trucks with metal and it clangs and batters and makes all kinds of noise. Our property value has already been devalued a couple of times by the County because the value's gone down because of the trash next door. We can't sell it.
Sprague: The Heises have complained to county and state officials for years. If this were Dallas or Fort Worth, zoning rules could have prevented the conflict from happening. But this is unincorporated Wise County, where TNRCC Regional Director Frank Espino says there are no zoning rules.
Frank Espino, Regional Director, Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission: When you're out in the country and you buy a home or property, there's no restrictions. There's no, like in the city where you have zoning, there's open zoning, whatever you want goes in there. And what you envision you want, may not be what your neighbor does, and that is where a lot of the problems come from.
Sprague: It's also hard to enforce the few state regulations that do exist - ones that say you can only recycle certain materials, for example. Tommy Tackett runs Boyd Salvage and Recycling, the facility next to the Heises. He says he's being harassed by residents and that he does follow state guidelines.
Tommy Tackett, Boyd Salvage and Recycling: They could have someone in here who really didn't care about environmental and really just messed the place up good. We've never done that. We're not intending to do it. We're just trying to make a living. The only material we use in our compost is material that we decompose back into the natural soil.
Sprague: That's not true, according to the TNRCC. The agency is investigating Tackett for dumping metals and other non-biodegradable trash on his land. The recycling center could be fined or shut down. The irony is recycling is supposed to be good for the environment, but the TNRCC's Frank Espino says, for neighbors of these facilities, it's a double-edged sword.
Espino: If recycling is done right, and we all do our part, it's a great thing. It's great for the environment. We're saving the environment and returning things to the environment. In many cases, we have a few bad actors, just like in everything. And that's what we have in this case.
Sprague: The Heises have heard this before. They're not confident the state can or will ever make it better. And even if they and the landfill opponents in McKinney are successful, the garbage will have to go somewhere. So activists and officials say until each Texan stops producing upwards of a ton of trash, or the weight of a VW Bug, every year, a ring around the collar scenario is likely in north Texas, where the major cities and suburbs are encircled by pockets of trash. For KERA 90.1, I'm Suzanne Sprague.