Williams: In Cumberland, a regional landfill project pits trash against history (2024)

The long slog to place a regional landfill in the footprint of a historic Black community of Cumberland County has pitted environmental justice against what elected officials in the county once dubbed “economic justice.”

The Green Ridge Recycling and Disposal Facility faces staunch resistance six years after the Cumberland Board of Supervisors — against the recommendation of the county Planning Commission — gave its blessing to the project.

It began as a Godzilla of a project: a 1,200-acre landfill whose service area would span a 500-mile radius and 21 states. Plans included the rerouting of narrow Pinegrove Road to bypass Pine Grove Elementary School, built in 1917 as part of the network of Tuskegee-Rosenwald schools established in the South to educate black children during segregation.

Frustrating residents has been a lack of transparency by county leaders seemingly unwilling to examine the project critically. In July 2020, four of five supervisors — amid opposition from neighboring counties — voiced the need for this landfill in their rural, economically bereft county.

“The prospects for working adults in this county are zero. We rely solely on property taxes in order to finance our county. We do not have the funds to support the services that are needed. We are seeking out businesses and industry to offset the economic burden on our citizens.”

The statement — made as protesters nationwide were marching for social justice — said other localities were attempting to deny Cumberland citizens “economic opportunity and economic justice.”

Green Ridge, which held a meeting Monday at Cumberland High School, has scaled down its project from its 2018 origins, according to spokesman Jay Smith.

The maximum number of waste tons per day has been reduced from 5,000 to 1,500, moved by no more than 75 trucks per day. The landfill’s height would peak at 100 feet instead of 330. The rerouting of Pinegrove Road has been abandoned and the landfill will not cross onto the side of the road where the historic school sits. And it will only accept waste from Virginia, Smith said, adding that these changes will be incorporated into the project’s conditional use permit.

To which landfill opponents say, trust and verify.

“Nothing is in writing” said Muriel Miller Branch, president of the AMMD Pine Grove Project, which led the effort to preserve the school she attended and her grandfather, John William Miller, helped build. Her organization was the force behind the school being placed on the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places in 2019 and 2020.

“All of those concessions were made because of regulatory constraints on them — not because they were being benevolent; not because we had asked,” she said, adding: “I haven’t really seen anything other than what is required of them by law or regulation that they’ve done.”

A Green Ridge study disputes allegations that the project disproportionately affects Black and low-income people. But whatever conclusions it has reached regarding demographics, this part of Cumberland contains a deep vein of African American history, culture and faith, with Black churches dating as far back as the 1860s and two other schools established as part of the collaboration between Sears and Roebuck philanthropist Julian Rosenwald and Tuskegee Institute founder Booker T. Washington.

In the meantime, Green Ridge Recycling and Disposal Facility says its project will generate millions of dollars of revenue for the county. And it is administering a down payment in the form of largesse as “part of our effort to be a good community citizen,” Smith said.

In 2020, it created a $60,000 scholarship fund to assist minority students, low-income students and first-generation college students. A year earlier, it provided more than $42,000 for new band uniforms at Cumberland High School and paid $400,000 to the county to close a budget shortfall. And in 2021, it donated $250,000 to the county to develop three new parks.

Branch, among others, questions the ultimate cost of the landfill.

“They’re trying to say that they’re good neighbors,” she said. “What people don’t understand is they’re not benevolent. This is just to placate people. And say, ‘Oh, we can kill you with our toxic waste, but look what we’ve done for you.’”

She fears the landfill will smell and render community tours around the Pine Grove unsafe because of truck traffic.

“The health harms would just be immeasurable,” she said. “You’re dealing with an aging population with preexisting conditions. And those conditions would only be exacerbated by the dust, the rodents and the birds that are going to flock there.” And then there’s the fear of water contamination, or methane fires in a county with volunteer firefighters. “So there are just a million reasons we don’t want the landfill here.”

This saga, sadly, is not unique. Whether it’s building an interstate highway through Richmond, a natural gas pipeline in Buckingham or a landfill in Cumberland, government or business seeks the perceived path of least resistance to ram through an indisputably undesirable piece of infrastructure. In Buckingham and in Cumberland, selective gifts and promises were made to divide and conquer a constituency.

Meanwhile, Cumberland County Landfill Alert says the landfill is not a done deal. And the nonprofit has hired an attorney and geologist to prevent it from ever being realized.

“There’s no guarantee that our well waters won’t be contaminated,” said Betty Myers, chairperson of CCLA, adding that most people in the county rely on private wells. And though Green Ridge’s Smith says Virginia landfills are approaching capacity, Myers disputes the need. “There’s sufficient landfills in Virginia to last over 20 years,” she said.

And though Green Ridge’s Smith says Virginia landfills are approaching capacity, Myers disputes the need. “There’s sufficient landfills in Virginia to last over 20 years,” she said.

Her organization is also leery of Green Ridge’s use of “initial” in its findings, and suspects it’s cover for the organization’s plans to ultimately dig a larger landfill. Smith says Green Ridge would have to reapply with the Department of Environmental Quality to do so, and any expansion would be hamstrung by its pledge not to cross Pinegrove Road.

The school is in the midst of a National Park Service-funded stabilization project under the direction of volunteer Jody Lahendro, a retired historic architect from Charlottesville.

He obtained a $290,000 National Park Service African American Civil Rights Grant for the stabilization phase of the project to repair the deteriorated building’s structural problems, repair its windows and replace its roof, which deviated from typical Rosenwald schools in using slate quarried from neighboring Buckingham.

The next construction phase would adapt the school to its next use. Branch envisions the one room of the two-room schoolhouse as “a living museum,” reflecting the life of a student there. The other room would be a gathering space for community meetings and art exhibits.

In July, the National Trust for Historic Preservation awarded $50,000 to Pine Grove School “to support research efforts to record oral histories and document the archival and ethnographic landscape of the historic Pine Grove community.”

All of this suggests that Cumberland, however lacking in financial resources, has untapped historical riches that would serve the country greater in the long run than becoming a repository for the rest of Virginia’s trash.

At a time when history is being censored or erased in the classroom, historic schoolhouses need extra protection. They deserve the loving care that Pine Grove is receiving — not a dump for a neighbor.

CORRECTION: In earlier print and online versions of this column,Muriel Miller Branch, president of the AMMD Pine Grove Project, was misidentified.

Michael Paul Williams (804) 649-6815