“This is a victory for community residents and all of us who care about protecting healthy communities and Lake Michigan. Chicago’s lakefront is for people and parks, not toxic waste dumps.”
Chicago— The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has withdrawn its Record of Decision for the Chicago Area Waterway System Dredged Material Management Plan and Environmental Impact Statement, effectively ending its plans to build a toxic dredged waste landfill on the Lake Michigan shoreline in Chicago’s Southeast Side community.
The Alliance of the Southeast (ASE) and Friends of the Parks (FOTP), represented by the Environmental Law & Policy Center (ELPC) public interest attorneys, filed a lawsuit in March 2023 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois to stop the Army Corps from building a new toxic waste landfill on 45 acres along the Lake Michigan shoreline. Chicago’s Southeast Side is already overburdened with toxic pollution that poses health risks to people who live there. Additionally, that shoreline site was promised long ago to the community to become a lakefront park for nearby residents and all Chicagoans to use and enjoy.
Howard Learner, ELPC’s Executive Director and lead attorney for the Plaintiffs Alliance of the Southeast and Friends of the Parks, said:
“Chicago’s lakefront is for people and parks, not toxic waste dumps. This is a victory for community residents and all of us who care about protecting healthy communities and Lake Michigan. The Army Corps of Engineers has now ecognized that its proposed new toxic waste landfill along the Lake Michigan shoreline in the Southeast Side environmental justice community does not comply with applicable legal requirements and defies common sense. The Army Corps has formally withdrawn its Record of Decision approving its outdated environmental impact statement. The Army Corps will now need to find better and more sensible alternatives that are outside of Cook County and reduce the dredged waste to the extent practicable. There are better solutions and better alternatives to the Corps’ flawed approach.
