Portia Shepherd of Uniontown has appealed to Montgomery County Circuit Court after the Alabama Department of Environmental Management dismissed her request for a public hearing on the expansion of the Arrowhead Landfill in Uniontown. She said she filed the appeal last week.
“ADEM dismissed my request for a hearing and called it a ‘legal nullity,'” Shepherd wrote in announcing the appeal on social media. “I am asking the court to look at what happened and give me the opportunity to have my request for a hearing properly considered.”
“I may have to take the long way,” she wrote, “but I am going to keep showing up, keep asking questions, and keep standing up for my right to be heard.”
The appeal follows ADEM’s approval of the expansion, which raises the amount of waste the landfill may accept. The expansion raises the landfill’s design capacity from 49.7 million to 63.9 million tons, an increase of almost 29 percent.
The landfill takes municipal and construction waste from 33 states in the eastern half of the country; the 1,345-acre facility receives up to 15,000 tons of waste a day on average, and chemical waste such as coal ash from the 2008 spill at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston plant has been a particular concern of Uniontown residents.
At a public hearing in Uniontown last November, the landfill’s operator, Perry County Associates LLC, made two requests: the expansion and a major source operating permit for air emissions.
The Herald reported July 26 that ADEM had listed the landfill as noncompliant with its wastewater pretreatment permit during fiscal 2025, according to a public notice from the department.
In July the Environmental Protection Agency proposed approval of Alabama’s coal ash permitting program, which would allow the state to close coal ash ponds at major power plants across the state. A 60-day comment period ended with a virtual hearing Sept. 3.
