The Jacksonville City Council and the mayor’s office are hoping to bring official closure to the city’s former landfill site, north of the city.
The city has been working with Fehr Graham since at least 2021 to get the site officially closed off of Illinois Route 78. City officials hope that the new set of eyes on the long-standing issue will finally get an official closure from the Illinois EPA and save the city an annual cost of $100,000. The city council approved a new $75,000 contract with the engineering firm Monday night in hopes that this will be the final year of work at the site, which hasn’t accepted trash since 1994.
Mayor Andy Ezard says frustration had mounted in recent years that nothing had gotten the close out on the site completed, but believes that new people will bring some form of a short-term plan to close it.
“ There’s new leadership. There are some new engineers. Some folks in the past that we’ve worked with have retired. So, there are new faces. We’re going to tackle it a different way. We’re going to start meeting with them in the early stages, coming up with a plan. And we’ll probably be coming back to the council probably with some asks as far as capital improvement in dollars in the upcoming years to finally close out that landfill. Which annually the city is on the hook for one hundred thousand dollars payment each year for the lease. So, we want to take care of that. We feel it is in our sights. We’ve been at it for many years now. But we are going to keep plugging away and trying to get that letter to say its closed.”
The yearly fees cover testing for things like leachate- water that has percolated through solids and leached out some of the remnants- and other chemical waste that could become landfill runoff. Recent high counts in some of those chemicals has led to the EPA’s denial to close the site.
Currently, there is no timeline or process in place for the closure. Ezard hopes that with the new eyes on the site, that a plan will come to fruition.