Nearly 11 years ago, a group of Dunmore natives and residents quickly pored over an unfavorable host agreement between the borough and the Keystone Sanitary Landfill during a council meeting, pointing out flaws in the contract and prompting the town to table the agreement for something more beneficial.
“That was really the beginning of Friends of Lackawanna, though we didn’t know it at the moment,” said Michele Dempsey, who is one of eight core, founding members of the grassroots group, which formed in 2014 to oppose the landfill and its decadeslong Phase III expansion. “Everybody who was in that room that night, or at least the core members, are still there today.”
That scrutiny of the landfill in Dunmore and Throop never ended for Friends of Lackawanna, as members of the nonprofit environmental group became fixtures at local meetings, public hearings and even the courtroom while they worked under the motto, “Don’t dump our future.” Despite forming with no political or activism backgrounds and no expertise on the landfill, those core members would spend the next decade opposing Keystone and its 42.4-year Phase III expansion, and growing their grassroots group to more than 5,000 members today.
“We were all just citizens who were going about our daily lives and who are just like, ‘Wait a minute, this doesn’t smell right, literally and figuratively,’” Dempsey said.
Following a four-year legal battle, Friends of Lackawanna’s volunteer-driven efforts culminated this month when the Pennsylvania Environmental Hearing Board remanded the Louis and Dominick DeNaples-owned landfill’s Phase III expansion approval back to the state Department of Environmental Protection over leachate and odor problems — two issues long argued by the environmental group. Approved by the DEP on June 3, 2021, the landfill’s Phase III expansion allows it 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.
Friends of Lackawanna appealed that decision to the state Environmental Hearing Board the following month, with the five-panel board of environmental judges ruling April 1 that the DEP erred in approving the landfill’s expansion by issuing a permit that does not sufficiently control or mitigate issues with odors and excessive leachate generation, which the judges said the DEP was aware of prior to approving the expansion. In handing down their decision, the judges sent the expansion approval back to the DEP to determine whether it needs to mandate additional measures to control odors and leachate. Leachate is the liquid that percolates through garbage piles.
“Were we so excited at an opportunity for this to be looked at again? Of course. Was this a huge win? Yes,” Dempsey said. “Are we done? No.”
In light of that court victory, members of Friends of Lackawanna reflected on their organization’s growth over the past decade and impact of grassroots environmental activism.
In response to questions about the effect citizen environmental activism can have on public policy, DEP spokeswoman Colleen Connolly said in an email that comments from the public are taken into consideration when the department reviews a permit application.
“The department welcomes comments from the public regarding environmental issues that impact them, including permit reviews, decisions, and operational performance,” she said.
‘Gave me more resolve’
Core members of Friends of Lackawanna agree their group emerged from a September 2014 Dunmore council meeting. At the time, the 714-acre landfill had just applied for its sprawling Phase III expansion, and amid that process, it was going to sign a new host agreement with Dunmore. The borough had been receiving the state minimum payment of $0.41 per ton of garbage hauled into the landfill, and during that meeting, borough officials considered a $1-per-ton agreement.
The landfill needed the town’s approval as part of its expansion plans, and at the meeting, then-Councilman Tim Burke, who also served as Dunmore’s mayor from 2018 through 2021, handed out copies of the agreement. A group of citizens attended the meeting with concerns and read through the agreement prior to public comment, Dempsey said.
After hurriedly looking through the proposed host agreement, Pat Clark, another core member of Friends of Lackawanna, addressed council, with the scrutiny pushing council to table the decision.
“I think things could have gone very differently,” Dempsey said. “(Council was) ready to sign the contract with the Keystone Sanitary Landfill that night, and they had to table it. That gave us another chance to regroup and come back to the next meeting — and keep coming back.”
The borough would go on to renegotiate its host agreement with the landfill in November 2014, with an annually increasing agreement that now sees Dunmore receiving $1.56 per ton of garbage hauled into the landfill for 2025, increasing by a penny per year. Although the agreement wasn’t perfect, Clark said it benefited Dunmore with tens of millions of dollars in additional revenue.
The core membership at that early meeting quickly realized that if they were going to go after the issue, and considering the landfill’s resources, they had to do so in a professional, organized way, Clark said.
“The first step in doing that was going to be to get a formal entity as a nonprofit,” he said.
They chose the name Friends of Lackawanna because the issue isn’t confined to Dunmore, Dempsey said.
“It’s so big, and it’s so far reaching in terms of the air and water, that it’s not just Dunmore and Throop,” she said. “This is really a regional issue.”
Dempsey recalled meeting with a local politician’s staff member shortly before Friends of Lackawanna formed. The staffer told her, “Listen, I consider you a friend. You’re not going to win this, and I just don’t want to see you waste your time,” she said.
“I left there in tears because he was being honest from what he knew,” Dempsey said. “Through my tears, I was like, ‘No, no, not while I’m here. Not on my watch,’ and it kind of gave me more resolve.”
Although in recent years the DEP’s phone lines have been flooded with odor complaints — something landfill officials often contend are frequently misattributed to Keystone — and while residents now pack important meetings about the landfill, Dempsey described a fear of speaking out a decade ago.
“The tides have turned. The community found its voice,” she said. “Today, the entire community is standing together, from residents to local officials, and that’s what grassroots power looks like.”
Core member Vince Amico, who served on Dunmore council from 2015 through 2023, including two years as president, believes the organization’s biggest accomplishment has ultimately been making people aware of what’s happening and showing them they can change the culture of their area.
“A small group of people can make a difference, not just to accept what’s put in front of you and say, ‘That’s just the way it is,’ and I think we’ve awoken a lot of people,” Amico said. “Politicians listen to us now, and they realize that this issue isn’t going away.”
‘Everything was work’
The landfill’s expansion review was initially estimated to take around 10 months, Clark said.
“We’re on year 11 now,” he said, chuckling as he wondered how many members would have stuck it out if they knew it’d be an 11-year endeavor.
Friends of Lackawanna is like a second full-time job for core members, who have families and careers, Dempsey said. While the DEP now has a webpage dedicated to the landfill with notices of violation, permit applications, communications and other documents available for the public to download, that wasn’t the case a decade ago.
“Everything was work. Everything required a Right to Know,” Dempsey said, recalling going to the DEP’s Wilkes-Barre office for in-person file reviews. “Everything was research.”
Without having facts and data, people would only listen to them to a point, she said.
“We had to find the facts and data,” she said. “We had to go out and find a lawyer. We had to hire environmental consultants.”
Some of those facts didn’t yet exist.
“The fact that a health study had never been done — you want a 50-year expansion, and we have no baseline here. We have no benchmark to say whether or not this is safe for the community,” Dempsey said.
Sharon Cuff, another core member of Friends of Lackawanna, agreed, calling the early days “research, research, research.”
“The hours put in reaching out to different organizations, reaching out to the health organizations, government officials, other grassroots (groups), just trying to find help along the way,” Cuff said. “The rest of it was just really trying to figure out everything that’s been going on over the years because we didn’t have any documentation.”
Notably, Friends of Lackawanna pushed for a health study. In April 2019, the state Department of Health and the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry released a public health report that concluded air quality around the landfill poses no long-term public health threat but can have short-term health effects on vulnerable individuals, such as pregnant women and the elderly. Those temporary health effects could include mild irritation of the eyes, nose, throat, skin and respiratory tract, according to the report.
Cuff, who strongly advocated for the study, contends it allowed them to emphasize the cumulative impacts of chronic exposure, even to low-level chemicals. Friends of Lackawanna pushed for transparency, she said.
“How much can one area take?” Cuff said.
As the grassroots group began to raise concerns about residents’ quality of life, health and future by laying out what they discovered, their support grew, Dempsey said, attributing it to “a lot of groundwork.” Members attended school board meetings, council meetings and other meetings, as well as working with local media, she said.
“It was slow, slow, slow and then fast,” Dempsey said, describing an early public meeting that packed Dunmore High School’s auditorium. “I couldn’t have fathomed this months before.”
The public’s perception of their group changed dramatically, Clark said.
“I’m sure there’s plenty of people out there who still think we’re crazy, and maybe they’re correct a little bit, but I think perception has shifted to … one of respect,” he said. “I think that tone has shifted because Friends of Lackawanna has proven as an organization that you can go about things in a professional way, just keep chugging along and doing the work at hand, and if you do that, and you always handle yourself the right way, and you are always willing to talk to people, and you always look at all the facts … there’s a segment of people that grow to respect that, and I think that segment grows over time.”
‘Better, brighter future’
Throughout the past decade, Friends of Lackawanna weathered setbacks, with the two largest being losing its first appeal before the state Environmental Hearing Board in 2017, followed by the DEP’s June 2021 approval of the landfill’s Phase III expansion.
Friends of Lackawanna initially appealed the landfill’s 2015 operating permit approval, citing underground fires, groundwater contamination and damage to liner systems. Two years later, the Environmental Hearing Board ruled in November 2017 that it would not rescind the landfill’s operating permit, though it did require Keystone to prepare a groundwater assessment plan because of leachate contamination that a monitoring well had detected since 2002. The board’s decision also criticized the DEP, determining, “The (DEP) relies upon formal, memorialized violations in conducting its review of Keystone’s compliance history, but the department, with rare exceptions, never memorializes any of Keystone’s violations.”
The ruling felt like a gut punch, but it also gave Friends of Lackawanna a roadmap to win its next appeal, Clark said.
“If we know there’s problems and they’re not writing them down, then we need to get these violations documented so that no one can deny them anymore,” Clark said. “That’s exactly what happened.”
In March 2024, a month before oral arguments began in Friends of Lackawanna’s expansion appeal, the landfill signed a consent order and agreement with the DEP that required it to pay a $575,000 civil penalty and undergo 26 corrective actions as the culmination of 14 odor-related violations since January 2023, close to 1,000 odor complaints in seven months and at least 70 instances of DEP staff detecting offsite landfill gas and leachate odors attributed to the landfill.
Friends of Lackawanna members especially consider the June 2021 expansion approval to be a challenging time.
But, the group continued their efforts to move toward their goal of a “better, brighter future for this area,” Cuff said.
“That’s always been the driving force,” she said. “It’s tough when you’re hit with loss after loss after loss, but again, there was so much positive happening, too.”
The expansion approval was the group’s low point, but it was also an easy call to action to keep going, Clark said.
“We kind of knew at the end of the day where we needed to get to, which was to challenge this expansion, and that’s where we got to this past month,” he said.
Support from the community also gave the organization extra drive, he said.
Clark also pointed to the “near universal support” Friends of Lackawanna received from local politicians, ranging from school boards and councils to federal legislators, starting with former U.S. Sen. Bob Casey.
“I’ll be forever thankful for that,” he said.
Dunmore Council President Janet Brier lauded the group in a statement.
“I believe FOL has had a positive impact on the whole region in that they have provided common sense and reason in contrast to a grossly negligent DEP decision,” Brier said.
With the major permit modification that granted the expansion now back in the hands of the DEP, and with the DEP recently extending its review of the landfill’s 10-year operating permit for six months through Oct. 6 in light of the Environmental Hearing Board’s decision, Friends of Lackawanna members plan to continue their work.
Dempsey wants the DEP to revoke the landfill’s permit, saying, “It’s too big, it’s too dangerous, and it’s time to shut down.”
“What’s next is to hammer that message home in whatever ways we can,” she said. “This gave us another energy boost to mobilize and get the community behind us. It was a big win that definitely restored a lot of morale and momentum and has inspired us to continue the fight.”