The state Department of Environmental Protection denied a request from Dunmore’s elected officials to permanently station an inspector in Lackawanna County to respond more quickly to odor complaints at the Keystone Sanitary Landfill.
Every member of borough council and the mayor signed a letter in August to DEP Secretary Jessica Shirley criticizing the department’s odor-reporting process, contending that response times from inspectors dispatched to odor complaints within the borough can “vary anywhere from 15 minutes to a number of days.”
The Aug. 28 letter asked the DEP to employ an inspector within Lackawanna County, rather than dispatching inspectors from its Northeast Regional Office in Wilkes-Barre, to reduce response times and “provide a more accurate account of the number and intensity of the odors coming from the landfill.” The typical response time is several hours, and by that time, the odor has dissipated, the borough said in the letter.
Council President Janet Brier and council members Katherine Mackrell Oven, Tom Hallinan, Michael Dempsey, William “Trip” O’Malley, Beth McDonald Zangardi and Patrick “Nibs” Loughney all signed the letter, in addition to Mayor Max Conway.
Shirley responded to the request Thursday in a letter addressed to council.
“DEP understands the importance of timely responses to odor complaints. While we share your goal of ensuring that odors are accurately assessed, DEP does not permanently assign inspectors to a single county or facility,” Shirley wrote, explaining DEP staff are assigned within a region’s geographic boundaries. “This allows DEP to respond to not only odor concerns from just one facility, but also to a wide range of environmental issues across the entire region from a host of facilities and sites.”
She concluded her letter by saying the department is open to meeting with members of council at DEP’s regional office, directing the borough to contact Northeast Regional Director Joseph Buczynski, P.E.
Borough council decided during its meeting Monday to request a meeting with DEP officials, including Shirley, Brier said. She emailed the department Tuesday to set up the meeting and was told Shirley would not be coming, Brier said.
“I would like to publicly ask Jessica Shirley to come and meet with us, or we will meet with her in Harrisburg, because she is the secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection,” Brier said. “We want to ask her what she perceives as the next steps to curb this situation that we have — this environmental disaster that we have.”
Brier previously sent Gov. Josh Shapiro a letter April 2 arguing the DEP’s odor-reporting process places the burden on residents, asking for harsher penalties on the landfill and requesting new decision-making personnel to evaluate the landfill in Dunmore and Throop’s remanded Phase III expansion.
“If they did understand the importance of (timely responses), then they would respond in a more timely manner, which they do not do,” Brier said.
The latest exchange comes weeks after the DEP temporarily extended the Louis and Dominick DeNaples-owned landfill’s operating permit for 15 months through Dec. 31, 2026, to give itself additional time to monitor Keystone’s odor controls and reevaluate its harms-benefits analysis.
The extension — the second the agency granted this year — stems from an April 1 ruling from the Pennsylvania Environmental Hearing Board that remanded the Keystone Sanitary Landfill’s massive Phase III expansion approval back to the DEP. The environmental judges determined the department erred in issuing the landfill a permit that didn’t sufficiently control or mitigate issues with off-site odors and excess leachate generation — problems the DEP knew about prior to approving the expansion, according to the ruling.
The ruling didn’t overturn the expansion, which allows the landfill to triple its volume of waste by hauling in just over 94 million tons, or about 188 billion pounds, of additional garbage through the 2060s, but it did require the DEP to review whether additional measures are needed in the landfill’s permitting to control off-site odors and excess leachate generation.
In March 2024, the landfill also signed a consent order and agreement with the DEP where it agreed to undergo 26 corrective actions to reduce odors and manage its leachate, as well as pay a $575,000 fine following 14 odor-related violations since January 2023, which included nearly 1,000 odor complaints in the span of seven months, as well as DEP staff smelling off-site landfill gas and leachate odors attributed to the landfill at least 70 times.
Shirley cited that consent order in her response last week, noting the landfill was required to construct and operate two 2.5-million gallon enclosed leachate tanks in lieu of using open-air leachate lagoons. The tanks became operational in early August, and the process of emptying the open lagoons may have contributed to a recent increase in odor complaints, she said. In response, Shirley said the DEP initiated twice-daily, off-hour odor patrols of surrounding areas, which she said resulted in more timely responses and the presence of DEP staff in areas where complaints were being registered.
When circumstances warrant, the DEP initiates odor patrols in communities where the public has increasingly identified issues, such as odors from a facility, allowing the DEP to provide timely investigations to complaints, Shirley said. The department previously conducted those patrols around the landfill in the morning and evening, both on weekdays and weekends, she said.
Brier contends the DEP’s process isn’t working. The council president has long criticized the department’s odor-reporting process, arguing that it places the burden on residents. She also wants the DEP to remove “emergency” language from its after-hours voicemail because it could discourage callers from leaving messages if they don’t consider odors to be emergencies.
“Citizens who are victims of this horrible smell should not be the people responsible for identifying them. DEP should be responsible,” Brier said. “We were hoping that they would comply with our request, which is not outrageous, considering the number of complaints and the size of the landfill and the long, long, long, endless history of non-compliance.”
She also wants additional enforcement action taken against the landfill for any noncompliance.
Councilman William “Trip” O’Malley, who had the idea for the August letter, was displeased with the DEP’s letter.
“Their response times have been really poor, and it doesn’t really seem like they have a plan to better the response times,” he said. “It just seems like the ‘protection’ part of their motto seems to be lacking, to say the least.”