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player ready...Kathleen Nagy recalls the peace and serenity of living at the end of Elkins Street before the arrival of what she and her neighbors call “trash mountain.”
Mounds of dirt, boulder-sized concrete chunks and rubble at the end of Elkins and McErlain Streets first began to mount two years ago in connection with the widening of Indiana Highway 23.
Neighbors say LaFree Excavating Inc. had been dumping fill material onto LaFree-owned property on the south side of Douglas Road, east of Indiana 23.
At first, Nagy said she didn’t pay that much attention to the trucks hauling highway rubble to the LaFree site.
Gradually the highway debris began to accumulate. And the noise grew.
“This used to be a nice, quiet area,” she said. “Now we hear trucks clanging and banging from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day.”
The landscape just east of her home has changed dramatically, especially in the wintertime when the foliage has dropped.
“Visitors have said, `Oh you have landfill over there,’ ” she said, casting a glance at the long, 30-foot-high wall of dirt at the end of the dead-end street. “Then it dawned on me. Yes, it is a landfill–with everything but the trash.”
Nagy and her neighbors have made many complaints to St. Joseph County and township officials and Indiana Department of Transportation officials.
“We were told there was nothing that could be done,” she said. LaFree has a permit to dump clean fill material on several acres of company property.
“It’s amazing that our county officials and people who are supposed to be looking after our interests have allowed this wall to be built,” she said.
Nagy said she spoke with owner Richard LaFree about the matter, and he promised the concrete chunks would be covered with dirt and grass planted.
LaFree made good on that promise recently and expects to begin seeding the dirt in September.
“I think it is going to look nice,” LaFree said in response to the complaints. “But I can see why people are complaining a little bit about it.”
LaFree said the project will be finished in four months with the completion of the Indiana 23 project. Eventually, the land will be developed, “but I haven’t decided anything yet,” he said.
Nor has he encroached on wetlands.
“I have had the Army Corps of Engineers, and they staked the boundaries (of the wetlands),” he said. “Hey, I’m all legal.”
Nagy agreed that recent work made “trash mountain” more presentable.
She called the disruption of her quiet neighborhood “absolutely terrible” and the response by county officials feeble.
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