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BRIGHAM CITY, Utah (AP) -- A Box Elder county commissioner has launched a one-man campaign against a proposed northern Utah landfill, posting an Internet site and holding neighborhood meetings to block the sale of the county's dump.
Rich Van Dyke voted last month to give preliminary approval to a conditional-use permit that would expand the Little Mountain dump near Corrine, allowing it to take waste from the new five-county Northern Utah Regional Landfill Association.
Now Van Dyke has changed his mind. He said he opposes the site and wants Box Elder County out of NURLA.
Van Dyke agrees that consolidation makes sense, but said he prefers an alternate site near Promontory and wants his county to keep the savings from the proposed mega-dump.
NURLA includes Box Elder, Cache, Weber, Morgan and Davis counties. The mega-dump would take in about 600,000 tons of trash annually and reduce the cost of garbage collections. The project has been in the works for about three years.
Engineering expert Brett Mickelson of Intermountain Geo-Environmental Services, who evaluated several dump site proposals called Promontory "the worst option of the bunch."
An access causeway over the Great Salt Lake would need more than $4.5 million in improvements and a deal to use would have to be hammered out with owner Union Pacific Railroad, County Commissioner Jay Hardy said.
But Van Dyke is steadfast in his opposition. He said it's his duty to bring citizen concerns to the council.
"I was approached by members of the Promontory group because they felt that they'd been passed over. I did some research and began to see what I would call inconsistencies," Van Dyke said.
A final vote on the Little Mountain proposal is Dec. 13 after a public hearing.
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Information from: Standard-Examiner
(Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
