Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 10, 1990 TAG: 9006100067
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ED SHAMY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: FIVE FORKS LENGTH: Medium
Billy Turner had it figured out. It was cheaper to build on Virginia 24, a farmer was eager to sell his land there, and a consulting engineer had identified it as the best spot.
Louise and George Walker gathered 149 signatures on a petition to make sure the landfill went elsewhere.
They are neighbors on the rolling countryside not a dozen miles south of Bedford, where the cattle outnumber the people and the loudest noises come from cicadas in the trees.
They were jolted a bit from their bucolic tranquility Wednesday night, when Bedford County supervisors picked a site in their midst for a new landfill.
The supervisors voted unanimously to put the landfill on a 363-acre tract along Virginia 43 south of Bedford.
Fewer than a dozen homes push back the fields and forests near the tract, but the people who do live there are bitter: James Teass, the supervisor who represents the district, voted to put the landfill on the site, just a mile and a half from his own home.
Some of his neighbors felt betrayed.
"We got a supervisor who doesn't give a damn," said Howell. Across the road, less than a mile from her ranch home, thick forest and overgrown farm fields will be cleared to make way for the $24 million landfill.
"We elected him to protect us, but he's just a `yes' person," said Louise Walker. "I'm not mad at him. I'm hurt. You can tell him that."
Walker lives in a plain white farmhouse shaded by a grove of trees. Hundreds of acres of grassy pasture roll from the homestead to the forest - the edge of the landfill property.
George Walker moved into the house as a toddler 75 years ago.
"It's just a shame," said Louise Walker. "I don't oppose a landfill. Somebody's got to get one. But it's going to be in my back door. That's pretty close. Looks to me like they [the supervisors] did an awful wrong thing."
Teass, she said, should have voted to keep the landfill out of his district: "We would have still lost, but at least he would have been on our side."
Teass was surprised to hear his neighbors are angry. He hasn't heard a word from them. "I didn't vote for political expediency," Teass said. "I voted for the best decision as I saw it."
Teass lives and farms just west of the landfill site. His cattle graze along Machine Creek. A pair of tributaries cross the landfill site and feed Machine Creek.
Teass is not worried.
"It's going to have plastic liners, eight monitoring wells, it's all regulated," he said.
"I gave it an awful lot of thought," said Teass, a supervisor for 10 years. He said he preferred the chosen site because it spared buildings and cultivated farm fields.
The neighbors plan no actions.
Turner doesn't see the landfill or increases in truck traffic having much effect on his dairy farm a few miles away.
"Sure it bothers me," said Howell, "but there's so many things in the world I can't do nothing about, I can't worry about it. If my own supervisor don't care, what am I going to do?"
"I don't know what we could do," Walker said. "The landfill don't hurt as much as that vote did."
by CNB