Dustin Harback lives steps from the Allied Paper landfill site. His 11-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son go to Parkwood Upjohn Elementary School and his family drives by the landfill daily.
Harback cited those reasons for bringing his children to a strategic meeting Tuesday organized in opposition to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's proposal to dig up soil laden with polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, on the edges of the Allied Paper landfill in Kalamazoo's Edison neighborhood and pile that waste on top of other contaminated soil on the site. The EPA plans to cap the 90-acre site and monitor it.
Harback said he wanted to join "some people that want to be bold and change the community." He said he wants his children to be able to walk through trails in his neighborhood and see deer instead of a landfill.
"I want to see all this moved," Harback said of the toxic waste on the Allied Paper landfill site. "Not just for us but for the generations that will live here."
More than 100 people attended the community meeting held at Goodwill Industries of Southwest Michigan. Kalamazoo City Commissioner Don Cooney helped the group develop a strategy to fight against the EPA's proposal, including naming six committees, including messaging, research, outreach, that will help the strategy work.
'What we really need is to get involved our elected officials: our congressman, our senators, but also our state officials, to get very much involved and have them put pressure on the Environmental Protection Agency," Cooney said.
Cooney said the group wants to mobilize the whole community and show elected officials this should be a top priority.
City commissioners and community members last week expressed outrage at the EPA's plan, in the latest battle over the landfill site. In 2007, Kalamazoo leaders' and residents' opposition to the EPA's plan to dump PCB-laden waste from Plainwell at the Allied Paper landfill caused agency officials to find a different solution.
City officials in 2011 sought an option from Wayne-based The Environmental Quality Co., to rid the landfill of the waste at an estimated cost of $98 million. EPA officials discounted that proposal, and said fully removing the contaminated soil would cost $238 million. City officials have said recently the EPA's estimate to rid the site of toxic soil jumped to $366 million.
About $50.5 million has been earmarked to clean up the site in a trust established in 2010 when the landfill's former owner, Millennium Holdings LLC, went bankrupt.
Bruce Merchant, public services director for the city, said this week that he plans to meet with EPA officials within days.
The EPA has proposed a quick timeline, including the release of a draft feasibility study for its plan in April, a public comment period including a public meeting and a formal hearing in mid-May, a record of decision for the site to be issued in September and work starting in this fall.
John Dillworth, president and CEO of Goodwill Industries of Southwest Michigan, volunteered his building for the meeting. His company's property sits on top of a federal Superfund site that runs generally from the Morrow Dam to Lake Michigan.
"We should be able to spend as much money to clean up the water that supplies to 125,000 people as we pay LeBron James or Justin Verlander," Dillworth said. "To the federal government this is peanuts but to the community this is a big deal."
Harback, for one, said he believes in the plan and believes the group will find a way to have the waste moved from his neighborhood.
"It'll be a legacy that we can leave future generations of folks that call Kalamazoo home," he said.