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Carol Stream trustees pull plug on landscape waste facility

Plans to build a transfer facility for landscape waste haulers are officially dead in Carol Stream after trustees revoked a special permit for the operators.

The move ends a nearly three-year saga that began when Organic Soils approached the village about building the facility on village-owned land along Kuhn Road. The two sides signed a lease in August 2014, but the company never broke ground and the village never received rent.

Trustees unanimously agreed Monday to rescind the special-use permit and return the vacant land to its original zoning designation as a single-family residence district.

The board last month pulled the plug on the seven-year lease with Organic Soils. If the company had secured a state permit to operate the facility, Organic Soils would have started paying the village $1,500 in monthly rent, or $18,000 a year, plus additional fees, under the terms of the original deal.

But the project became plagued by delays, and some trustees late last year said they had lost faith in the operators after granting a series of deadline extensions. An attorney for Organic Soils apologized on behalf of his client last October and told the board the company "dropped the ball" on overseeing the project and securing a wetlands permit from the Army Corps of Engineers.

Organic Soils later dropped its initial objections to the board's move to terminate the permit that banned residents from dropping off waste at the facility.

Neighbors, meanwhile, continued to oppose the facility because of concerns about traffic, noise and odor.

The facility would have operated six days a week for all but two months of the year on more than one acre within the Carol Stream Water Reclamation District.

Both independent contractors and municipal waste haulers serving Carol Stream and neighboring towns would have unloaded landscape materials at the site at 295 N. Kuhn Road. Then trailers would have picked up the landscape waste bound for a composting facility in Bristol.

Under the lease, the facility also would have accepted waste from village properties at no cost.

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