City to dump landfill soon

By Cody Bozarth

There’s a roughly 80-acre parcel of land in Morgan County that’s well maintained, well monitored, almost entirely unused and costing the city of Jacksonville about $110,000 every year.

Finally, after more than 20 years of post-closure care, the city is almost free of the burden that is the site of the former municipal landfill.

This week, Mayor Andy Ezard announced that because the city was approaching the end of its required post-closure care, city officials sat down with the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency and PDC Technical Services.

“We all sat in the same room and said, ‘What is it going to take to get the landfill closed?’” Ezard said. “It was a very clear message of what had to be done, what would satisfy EPA. … PDC came back with a contract and said this is it.”

The final bill of closure amounted to about $11,000 — covering the final testing of monitoring wells and other work — and hopefully will be done this year. With that, the city will be free of the annual six-figure expense for land it does not use.

Parks and Lakes Superintendent Bruce Surratt said the property owner is anxious to take it back from the city and turn the area into hunting ground. The lease the city has on the property is just one part of the yearly expense.

“The big part of it is the lab work,” Surratt said. “They have to take samples from all of those wells. They take the samples back to the lab and break it down for every compound in it and send the results to EPA. Those have to be done quarterly. … Nothing’s free, and you’re dealing with engineers and lab technicians, and they really don’t come free.”

The city closed the landfill after the state mandated the closure of 25-30 percent of such sites all over the state. Surratt said the city tried to fight against the mandate but was unsuccessful. In order to protect the integrity of groundwater from leachate — liquid runoff from waste sites —the regulations for closure are non-negotiable, and the city would face steep fines for failure to comply.

“We haven’t put a Dixie cup there in over 20 years, but EPA rules say you have to have post-closure care,” Surratt said. “You don’t walk away from it.”

Numerous federal regulations must be followed to close a landfill, generally requiring a 30-year closure plan, though shorter plans can be approved. Closing the landfill itself required the installation of a final cover system that is designed to minimize infiltration and erosion, part of which is using earthen material for an 18-inch infiltration layer and 6-inch erosion layer.

The post-closure plan requires the site be constantly monitored to maintain the integrity of the final cover, the leachate collection system and the gas and groundwater monitoring systems.