What city would proposal a garbage dump close to residential dwellings?
The owners of the former Fort Wayne Foundry site on Pontiac Street wants a garbage dump on its property as a way station for collected garbage. In addition, an adjacent transfer station owned by Summit Recycling & Transfer will be used for recycling. It is a good marriage for the two businesses, the recycling business would be able to sort through the garbage for recycle to sell. But what about the residents who live in the neighborhood?
What neighborhood is this?
A neighborhoods that is predominately African-Americans in an old manufacturing neighborhood. You know the type of neighborhood where companies built houses for its workers to live close by. It was the northern way of life that was akin to the slave plantation. Except, these folks could rent houses from the company owners. Now that era has almost passed, raced whites moved to the suburbs, and African-Americans family steered to the area have inherited the declining neighborhoods.
Now, that the manufacturing is in decline, the public nuisance needs cleaning up. Instead, monied owners are turning the area into sites for dump? Economic development in these neighborhoods once limited to liquor stores, hair salons, barber shops, soul food restaurants, and daycare centers. These businesses do not generate enough income for duplicity or divestment into other types of business for the neighborhood. What happens as the owners age out and no one to replace the businesses tracts of abandoned and undeveloped property began to cluster up the neighborhoods. Sometime, investors will land bank clusters of property in these neighborhoods.
By land banking the area, these owners sit on the property hoping to sell the properties to outside investors willing to pay a large sum for the overpriced property. While merchants wait om these investors, the area become infected with quick change artists,ie,, dope dealers and poverty pimp agents. STill some in the community believe that development will come, even if long overdue.
Now the greatest of insult, the plan is for the area will be a garbage dump, overpowering pollution, congested traffic from garbage trucks and more TB, lead poisoning and cancer to join the permissive drug dealing. Can you imagine anything worse to an area so neglected?
The mayor of the city, Tom Henry's brother has a stake in this new trash hauling company called, Earth First, LLC.
The new company plans to use the new waste transfer station at the former Fort Wayne Foundry to ship its garbage to Jay County.
Sounds like a green project huh, with a huge ring of environmental racism. Many of these trash transfer station are disproportionally ending up in low income neighborhood that are predominately African-Americans.
In its simplest form, a transfer station is a facility with a designated receiving area where waste collection vehicles discharge their loads,according to and Environmental Protection Agency report. The new business will conducts it's recycling component even if they don't get the $9 million dollar a year contract for hauling garbage.
So, what does the residents have to say about this change in their neighborhood? The EPA report suggest the public should be involved, “siting process that includes continuous public participation is integral to developing a transfer station. The public must be a legitimate partner in the facility siting process to integrate community needs and concerns and to influence the decision-making process. Addressing public concerns is also essential to building integrity and instituting good communications with the community. Establishing credibility and trust with the public is as important as addressing environmental, social, and economic concerns about the solid waste facility.”
Something tells me that was never part of the $9 million deal.
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