“You’re Responsible.” Charging Environmental Racism, Shingle Mountain Resident Sues City of Dallas to Immediately Clean-Up Dallas’ Largest Illegal Dump
(DALLAS) — Saying that it’s official neglect and inaction make the City of Dallas as responsible for the existence of Shingle Mountain as the scam artists who operated it, lawyers for Southern Dallas resident Marsha Jackson amended her on-going federal lawsuit on Thursday to include City Hall.
According to the filing, “The City issued the permits to operate facility in violation of deed restrictions and related zoning code provisions prohibiting this use on the site. The City has subsidized the expenses of the creation and operation of Shingle Mountain by exempting the facility from the expenses that would have been required to avoid the risks of imminent and substantial endangerment to health or the environment. The City of Dallas has the legal power to require the removal of Shingle Mountain. It can summarily abate the use because it is located within the floodplain, but it has not done so.”
Jackson, now in her third year of fighting for a clean-up of the estimated 100,000 tons of hazardous asphalt shingle waste, expressed disgust and frustration over the lack of official action. “The City of Dallas is just as much to blame as the con artists who set this scheme in motion. City officials have sat back and done noth- ing to help us while we struggle to breathe clean air every day. There’s no urgency at all, because we live in Southern Dallas and our lives don’t matter.”
Attorneys Michael Daniel and Laura Beshara are veteran civil rights attorneys who have brought several hous- ing discrimination, voting, and environmental cases against the City of Dallas. Daniel& Beshara brought the landmark case that was responsible for requiring the City to remediate the illegal Deepwood landfill because of the City’s contributions to creating that illegal landfill next to a Black neighborhood. The City was required to initiate and maintain the Trinity River Audubon Center on the site.
In their filing on behalf of Jackson, they accuse the city of allowing the illegal dump to operate without any oversight and then ignoring the public health problems it’s created for residents. It cites recent past examples where the Dallas City Council acted swiftly to move other industrial polluters when new development was threatened, including the 2015 vote to relocate the Argos concrete batch plant from the Trinity Groves area in near West Dallas, and concludes the city’s institutional prejudice toward Southern Dallas is denying Jackson and other Shingle Mountain residents of their rights and health.
This is the first time the City itself has been legally implicated in the Shingle Mountain debacle. It’s had its own lawsuit against the dump’s operators for over a year, but that’s resulted in no removal of wastes since the forced closure of operations in March 2019. No hearing date for this new amended suit has been set yet by the federal District Court assigned the case.
