The Maury County Commission unanimously enacted the Jackson Law, a measure that gives local governments control over whether to approve privately-owned landfills and trash facilities within their jurisdictions. The 21-0 vote followed widespread community backlash over plans by Louisiana-based Trinity Business Group to create a large-scale waste processing and recycling plant, tire shredding facility and incinerator on the site of the former Monsanto Chemical Company, just outside the city limits of Columbia.

The county’s adoption of the Jackson Law gives local elected officials another tool in the fight to forestall the mega waste site from coming to the rural area, where residents packed the county courthouse on Monday united in opposition. For decades, Monsanto mined phosphorous, manufactured fertilizer and — for a time — chemical warfare agents for the federal government on the 5,300-acre site. It is now a federally-designated Superfund site, a result of unknown quantities of contaminants that lurk beneath the surface. The Duck River flows nearby, the sole source of drinking water for the county.

“Passing the Jackson Law will send a message: Don’t mess with the Duck River in Maury County,” said Ed Penrod, who said he has 55 years of experience as a fish and wildlife biologist. Trinity Business Group’s plans for the Monsanto site would likely stir up long buried chemicals and contaminants he fears will contaminated the Duck River. “In the past few years some people have realized the new gold is garbage,” said Stephanie Sparks-Newland, a public school teacher who has lived in Maury County for 32 years. “But I don’t want to see us become the spot where all of Middle Tennessee sends its trash.”

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