From the Tribune:

Gold rush in trash looming
Kendall County targeted for dumps

By Russell Working
Tribune staff reporter

March 16, 2007

Robert and Sue Cummings loved their retirement home near Minooka, with its barn, 5 acres of horse pasture and horizons of Kendall County farmland. But when a new company offered to buy the place, they didn't have much of a choice.

The firm made it clear it was planning to build a dump, and the couple's neighbors already had decided to sell. Not wanting to be flanked on three sides by a landfill, the retirees reluctantly agreed to the deal.

The dump is one of three proposed by companies seeking to unload municipal garbage in Kendall County as landfill space dwindles regionwide. Big Trash has arrived, a multibillion-dollar industry that promises windfalls to cash-hungry governments. But it is bringing controversy--and a whiff of big city scandal--to the cornfields of this fast-growing region southwest of Chicago.

Kendall Land and Cattle--which is buying the Cummingses' property--is led by three politically connected businessmen, including a trucking boss who was a central figure in Chicago's troubled Hired Truck program and a former state senator who had to stop spreading Chicago "yard waste" on his fields after the state ruled the substance was actually garbage.

Next to the Kendall Land site is a second dump proposed by a Detroit firm whose chief executive officer has been dogged by controversy over trash disposal bids. A third landfill is planned for the property of a Yorkville farmer who wants to convert a composting site for yard waste. The developers are sweetening the deal in a region that is struggling to build roads and sewer systems for a booming population.

Kendall County looks to make at least $4 million a year from the Kendall Land site west of Minooka, which eventually will be bought and operated by the Illinois subsidiary of Waste Management Inc., a Houston-based giant in trash collection and disposal.

The City of Yorkville, with an annual budget of $57 million, also would make about $4 million a year from its proposed dump.

The third dump, also west of Minooka, is negotiating a host agreement. With a lengthy review process ahead, it is too soon to say how many of the landfills may be built, officials say.

But the Cummingses already are reeling from the changes.

"It's a terrible situation," Sue Cummings said. "We thought we'd be here 'till we moved into town, into the nursing home or whatever."

There's a reason for the sudden gold rush in trash.

With the recent closings of several dumps in the region, counties such as Cook and DuPage have shut the door to further waste, said Charles Murphy, spokesman for Fox Moraine, the company proposing the Yorkville site.

That means northeastern Illinois has only nine years before current landfills reach capacity, said Maggie Carson, spokeswoman for the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency. Kendall County offers cheaper land that is within trucking reach of Chicago.

And the Kendall Land group is no stranger to Chicago. The company is led by trucking boss Michael Tadin, former state Sen. Jerome Joyce and contractor Patrick Harbour.

Tadin, president of the Marina Cartage trucking firm, was a major contractor with the scandal-plagued Hired Truck program, in which the City of Chicago paid private firms to haul waste and materials to and from construction sites, but some did little or no work.

Tadin has said his firm always did the job the city hired it to do.

Also, Tadin and Joyce were beneficiaries of a seven-year, $300 million contract won by Waste Management to handle Chicago's controversial blue bag recycling program. Under that contract, Waste Management used Tadin's firm to haul waste from city recycling centers. Much of the yard waste went to Joyce's farm near Kankakee.

The Illinois EPA banned the practice, telling Waste Management that the blue bag material was garbage that smelled bad and bred pests.

The third businessman, Harbour, heads Plainfield-based Harbour Contractors and won a no-bid deal to manage improvements at O'Hare International Airport in 1992.

Joyce and Harbour did not return calls by the Tribune. Reached by phone, Tadin declined to comment.

The proposal for the other dump near the Kendall Land site comes from Lisbon Development, headed by an executive at the Detroit-based Soave Enterprises, a $1.6 billion-a-year firm led by President and CEO Anthony Soave. His company includes businesses that deal with metals recycling, real estate, industrial services and beverage distribution.

Soave Enterprises formerly owned a company whose subsidiary was indicted in 2003 on charges of pouring millions of gallons of untreated toxic liquid waste directly into Detroit's sewer system from 1997 to 99. (Soave sold the company early in 1998).

Two executives of the subsidiary eventually pleaded guilty in 2004 for crimes that occurred in 1998-99, after Soave sold the company. But the guilty executives had worked at the plant under Soave ownership, according to the 2003 indictment.

"All of these incidents occurred after that sale and involved alleged violations by the new owners and its management," said Soave spokesman Emile Mahanti in a written response to questions.

Soave has found itself repeatedly entangled in bidding controversies, including one that followed the 1991 firebombing of another trash company in Warren, Mich. The day after the firebombing, the mayor urged the City Council to award a $16 million, no-bid contract to a company in which Anthony Soave was a silent partner.

Soave was never implicated in the arson, and a Macomb County, Mich., prosecutor later wrote Soave a letter stating that neither the company nor any employee was suspected of any criminal wrongdoing.

The Yorkville landfill proposal has stirred up controversy of its own. Illinois Highway 71, where the landfill is located, is dotted with signs that read, "No landfill. No Chicago garbage."

Yorkville residents have crowded into meetings to object after the company broke off negotiations with the county and instead turned to the city. The city extended its boundaries to annex the property.

Mayor Art Prochaska says it's only natural that Yorkville would want control of the project.

"The city being the community that's pretty much downwind of it, I felt that the city of Yorkville should be the group that's looking at it and judging the process," Prochaska said.

Ethan Hagen, a chiropractor, lives on Whitewillow Road west of Minooka, and says his home won't be bought because he is across the street from the proposed landfill. He says Kendall Land has the clout in Chicago to get a contract for that city's garbage, and predicts there will be 1,000 trucks a day on the road.

"All three of my children were born in this house," he said. "And then they want to put a six-story mound of garbage 800 feet from the front porch. They are going to destroy my dreams if they do this."