Illinois EPA opposes proposed toxic waste dump expansion on Southeast Side lakefront
In a letter filed in federal court, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency said the proposed expansion of a toxic waste dump on the Southeast Side would go against state law. It's the latest development in a lengthy battle over the future of a 45-acre disposal site on the Lake Michigan shoreline.
'This is a major win for our community, to have both the Illinois attorney general and the Illinois EPA say that the expansion of this toxic landfill will not be (approved),' said Amalia NietoGomez, executive director of social justice nonprofit Alliance of the Southeast.
Since 1984, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been dumping toxic sediment dredged from the Calumet River into the now-full containment site, which contains mercury, arsenic and polychlorinated biphenyls or PBCs. After reaching capacity or after 10 years, whichever came first, the property was to be returned to the Chicago Park District to restore as a park for the largely Black and Latino community.
Four decades later, the property hasn't been turned over to the community, and the Army Corps wants to raise the dump 25 feet, piling an additional 1 million cubic yards of toxic sediment over another 20 years. In 2023, the Alliance of the Southeast and Friends of the Parks sued the Army Corps to stop the expansion.
So far, the Illinois EPA has denied the federal agency all of the state water quality permits it would need to proceed. The state's Attorney General Kwame Raoul has also staunchly opposed the proposed project; in 2024 he filed an amicus brief in support of turning the dump into a public park.
More recently on Jan. 16, Raoul filed — alongside a supplemental brief with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois — a letter that the state's environmental agency had sent to the Army Corps the previous day. In that letter, the Illinois EPA said the Army Corps' proposal is contrary to some environmental regulations, including an Illinois law that prohibits the construction of new landfills or the expansion of existing landfills in Cook County.
The plaintiffs' lead attorney Howard Learner, executive director of the Environmental Law and Policy Center, called the Illinois EPA letter a 'vital step forward' to a 'long-delayed victory' in a news release.
'It's time for the Army Corps to recognize it lacks the legal authority to build on this lakefront site and move forward with better alternative solutions,' he said. 'Chicago's lakefront is for people and parks, not toxic waste dumps. The long-promised park should now go forward for Chicagoans to use and enjoy.'
After the letter was filed, the center's attorneys asked to meet with the Army Corps' legal team to discuss productive next steps. A meeting with the federal judge hearing the case has been set for Monday. The Army Corps declined to comment due to ongoing litigation.
Last year, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling largely seen as anti-environment overturned 40 years of legal precedent that required courts to defer to federal agencies' interpretations of ambiguous statutes. But the Environmental Law and Policy Center hopes to leverage the ruling in its favor, using it to argue that the judge has full discretion to determine whether the Army Corps overstepped when determining it could keep and expand the dump site.
The plaintiffs hope the property can be remediated and transformed into an extension of nearby Calumet Park, where neighborhood children swim and play. The existing toxic sediment has already given community members plenty of cause for concern.
'The only thing that separates the (disposal site) from Calumet Park is a chainlink fence,' NietoGomez said. 'So it's not just close, I mean, it's right there.'
Restoring the site would provide more recreational green spaces in a ward that has long been overburdened with pollution from the steel and petroleum coke industries, where asthma and cancer rates are high.
People living on the Southeast Side breathe some of the city's dirtiest air, monitoring data shows. More than 75 polluters in the area have been investigated for Clean Air Act violations since 2014, including companies that contaminated yards and playgrounds with brain-damaging manganese and lung-damaging petcoke.
'If we have concerns about the current (dump site), it doesn't make sense to amplify those concerns and build more of the same on top,' NietoGomez said.
She also said it would be a 'bad idea' to expand the landfill on the lakeshore where — as climate change intensifies storms and wave surges, as well as fluctuations in lake levels — the facility would be at risk of rupture.
But the Army Corps contends they need somewhere to dispose of the sediment that has to be routinely dredged from the Calumet River so that commercial ships can pass through waterways connecting the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River basin.
In the Illinois EPA letter, acting director James Jennings urged the Army Corps 'to explore alternative means to manage dredged materials,' including its disposal at permitted landfills or even 'upland beneficial use,' which would entail its use on dry land for habitat creation, land reclamation, soil enhancement or even construction materials.
The lawsuit largely centers around the plaintiffs' claims that the Army Corps didn't consider alternative locations for a new dump or adequately assess the risks of expanding the current site.
'They told the Southeast Side to pick their poison and choose from six sites, and they were all located within the 10th Ward,' NietoGomez said. It caused uproar within the community. 'Enough is enough. We're sick and tired of being your dumping ground.'
As President Donald Trump's deregulatory agenda threatens environmental policies and rules regarding clean air, clean water, toxic chemicals and more, NietoGomez feels encouraged by the state's opposition to expanding the dump site.
'Going forward, dealing with the new administration,' she said, 'I think it's more important than ever that we enforce the protections that we do have, whether that be at the city, county, state or federal level. … That's why the letters from both the Illinois attorney general's office and Illinois EPA carry particular weight.'
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When Cuomo made his entry into the race, many expected that his name recognition and his support from wealthy backers would give him an easy win over a series of well-meaning but uninspiring challengers. Cuomo positioned himself as someone who would stand up to Trump and urged voters to look past his own scandals—he resigned in 2021 after a series of sexual-harassment allegations, which he denied—and to recall instead his level-headed COVID briefings. Of all the candidates, he argued, only he had the management skills to revive a city that has just seemed off since the pandemic. But Cuomo ran a desultory campaign, limiting his exposure to reporters and, more important, to voters. His long-held ambivalence toward the city was evident, as were the rumors that he viewed Gracie Mansion merely as a stepping stone to higher office. He couldn't shake his humiliating exit as governor. A late endorsement from former President Bill Clinton only reinforced the notion that Cuomo represented an aging, tarnished generation of Democrats. 'Cuomo relied on older establishment endorsements that no longer hold weight in the city,' Christina Greer, an associate political-science professor at Fordham University, told me. 'Cuomo also underestimated the extent to which New York voters are tired of disgraced politicians using public office as their contingency plan for life.' (Bill de Blasio, the former New York City mayor who has feuded with Cuomo for years, told me that he ran a 'grim, fear-based campaign with no authentic big ideas.') [David A. Graham: How voters lost their aversion to scandal] To categorize Mamdani at the beginning of the race as an afterthought would have been an insult to afterthoughts. He has served not even five years in the state assembly, and has little of the experience generally thought needed to manage a civic workforce of more than 280,000 people and a budget of $115 billion. (The New York Times' editorial board deemed him unqualified for the job.) But Mamdani did have energy and charm, and no shortage of ideas that were quickly turned into easy-to-digest slogans such as 'Free buses' and 'Freeze the rent.' He relentlessly focused on affordability and economic issues, a welcome message in a city with an extraordinarily high cost of living and stark income stratification. Mamdani revealed himself to be remarkably adept at communicating his message, mastering social-media memes and delivering powerful speeches that evoked far more of Barack Obama's loft than Biden's whisper. He said yes to seemingly every interview and every podcast, tossing aside the caution traditionally preached by the focus-group-wielding political-consultant class. He tapped into liberal New Yorkers' anger over Gaza. He resonated with young people, including young men, who not only turned out for him but also volunteered for his campaign, creating an enthusiastic army of believers that created a noticeable contrast with Cuomo's support from donors, unions, and establishment figures. In the race's final days, a cheerful Mamdani walked the length of Manhattan, a metaphor for the tirelessness he brought to the race. 'The Democrats nationally need to start doing what Zohran just did. When we metaphorically sit at the kitchen table and empathize and offer passionate solutions, we win,' de Blasio told me. 'We didn't do that in 2024, and that was a big reason we lost.' Mamdani did what so many Democrats failed to do last fall: He excited new voters, focused on economic issues, and communicated his story well. And most of all, he won, including in racially and economically diverse neighborhoods. As of this writing, it appears that there will be no need to rely on multiple rounds in New York City's new ranked-choice voting system; although Mamdani did not crack the 50 percent threshold last night to win the nomination outright, he surpassed Cuomo by about eight points, and the former governor conceded. 'Mamdani created a movement around his candidacy, and the big lesson for Democrats is that young voters are looking for a larger social-political movement and not just an anti-Trump party,' Basil Smikle, a New York–based political strategist who has worked for Cuomo and Hillary Clinton, told me. 'His victory suggests there's a needed reformation of the Democratic coalition, and repudiation of incrementalism but also a more wholesale shift from establishment politics.' But the reverberations from Mamdani's candidacy aren't all reassuring ones for Democrats. Republicans have mocked his socialist ideas by evoking the barren supermarkets of the Soviet Union. They've seized on his previous calls to 'Defund the police' (Mamdani called for reducing the NYPD budget in 2020; he was the only candidate in the Democratic field this year to not pledge to hire more cops). A few Republicans have trotted out racist and Islamophobic stereotypes (Mamdani is of Ugandan-Indian descent and is Muslim). Some Democrats, too, are leery of Mamdani's call for new taxes on businesses and the rich, warning that such policies could lead to a wealth exodus from New York. Republicans have pointed to the sinking poll numbers of Chicago's progressive mayor, Brandon Johnson, as evidence that liberals can't govern. Last night, Vice President J. D. Vance posted on social media, 'Congratulations to the new leader of the Democratic Party,' tagging Mamdani. Trump today went one step further, posting that Mamdani was a '100% Communist Lunatic.' Mamdani's depiction of Israel's actions in Gaza as a genocide threatens to unnerve some members of the city's large and politically active Jewish population. Within hours of Mamdani's acceptance speech, Republican Representative Elise Stefanik of New York sent a fundraising appeal calling him a 'Hamas Terrorist sympathizer.' Mamdani has defended the pro-Palestinian slogan 'Globalize the intifada' but has denied accusations that he is anti-Semitic. He has said that he supports an Israel that provides equal rights to all of its citizens, but he has repeatedly dodged questions about whether Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state. [Jonathan Chait: Why won't Zohran Mamdani denounce a dangerous slogan?] 'Mamdani is a gift to Republicans. They will link every Democrat to his far-left policy proposals,' Susan Del Percio, a Republican strategist who worked in Rudy Giuliani's mayoral administration, told me. 'As mayor of New York City, every single thing he does will be held under a microscope by Democrats and Republicans alike. And some of these things are really out there.' When the mayoral race began, the conventional wisdom was that the Democratic primary would be the de facto general election. That is no longer quite the case. Before last night, Cuomo had previously signaled that if he lost the primary, he might run in November on another ballot line, believing that the glow around Mamdani might wear off with more time and scrutiny. (Those close to Cuomo think that an independent run, though possible, might now be less likely given the margin of his defeat this week.) And while the Republican nominee, the anti-crime activist and radio-show host Curtis Sliwa, seems to have little chance, Mamdani's win might open the door again for Adams; in a remarkable plot twist, the mayor has told associates that he can now position himself as the steadier choice to keep the job. A person close to Trump told me that the president might enjoy wading into the race in his former hometown and would consider endorsing Adams, though he might opt against it out of concern that it would hurt Adams more than help him. Still, the Democratic nominee will be considered the favorite. If Mamdani wins, there will be only so much that his fellow Democrats can learn from the specifics of the race, given New York's liberal tilt. But maybe there will be some lessons that are less about ideology and more about tactics—having energy, communicating clearly and frequently, and focusing on personal economic issues. 'I've already heard from some Democrats who worry that this guy is going to get us all labeled as socialists,' the Reverend Al Sharpton, the civil-rights leader and Democratic stalwart, told me. 'But he hit on something; he connected with something. Mamdani kept showing up. Democrats need to keep showing up.' Article originally published at The Atlantic
