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Polishing teeth with a smile awards James DeFinnis of Back Mountain Dental ‘Best Dentist award

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Patches of sluggish traffic for Saturday commute

<p>WILKES-BARRE &#8212; Sometime in the mid-1980s, I visited my old neighborhood on Reynolds Street in Plymouth.</p><p>I had my very young nephew with me and wanted to show him where my pals and I used to play outside all day &#8212; stocking ball, wiffle ball, tag, hide and seek, up-against &#8212; and where we used to explor.</p><p>When I was a kid, there was a creek behind my house and further up the mountain were three dams filled with water and wildlife where we swam on those hazy, hot and humid summer days.</p><p>As we neared the top of Reynolds Street, Mr. Miklosi was in his yard tending to his garden and his spotlessly clean Chevrolet. My nephew and I stopped to chat a bit and that&#8217;s when I noticed a bulldozer on top of a mountain. That wasn&#8217;t there when I was a kid.</p><p>I asked Mr. Miklosi to explain. He told me the bulldozer was working at the West Side Landfill. But why was there a mountain?</p><p>That&#8217;s where the story got interesting.</p><p>The West Side Landfill Authority &#8212; comprised of 12 West Side communities &#8212; had received a permit for a 240-acre site in Plymouth Township along Keating Street at the Larksville border. The problem was the authority could secure only one permit from the then-Department of Environmental Resources and, before more areas could be permitted, the garbage piled up and up and up.</p><p>Trucks from as far away as New Jersey filed into the landfill at all hours and dumped on that one permitted area. The garbage grew to be a mountain &#8212; affectionately (or unaffectionately) named Mount Trashmore.</p><p>More problems ensued as the mountain of waste rose to the heavens. The leachate collection system was unable to catch the &#8220;garbage juice&#8221; which ran into the non-permitted areas.</p><p>I don&#8217;t think there ever were any detected ill effects of this garbage soup runoff, but I do recall some fine residents of the area relating tales of meaner dogs, enormous tomato plants and a smell not conducive to romantic interludes that often occurred on the site.</p><p>Now, decades later, we have a neglected landfill site with apparently no steward. The landfill authority, established in 1963, is defunct &#8212; its 50-year lifespan ran out in 2013.</p><p>Colleen Connolly. community relations coordinator at DEP&#8217;s Northeast Regional Office, said DEP has not conducted soil sampling at the site for some time. She said the environmental concerns are mostly exposed garbage and the integrity of the cap at the 17-acre permitted part of the landfill. Let&#8217;s hope DEP is right.</p><p>Connolly and Paul Keating, Kingston&#8217;s administrator, said trespassers on the property are creating ruts and erosion issues on the protective cap. That cap helps control landfill gas emissions and prevents the exposure of old waste to vectors.</p><p>Oh, yeah, there have also been reports of target shooting on the site.</p><p>Connolly said redevelopment of the landfill itself is &#8220;highly unlikely.&#8221; She said any development of the property would be up to the owners, not DEP. But who owns it?</p><p>Nobody wants to assume responsibility of this &#8220;sanitary landfill&#8221; as it was once called. There were promises of baling garbage into neat little squares and piling them nicely onto the environmentally-safe site for the next 50 years.</p><p>I don&#8217;t recall any baling ever being done in the big baling building &#8212; now deteriorating &#8212; that was constructed on site.</p><p>After all these years of failed promises, the landfill and Mount Trashmore continue to stand in tribute to just how bad good ideas can be.</p><style>
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<div class="neCaption">Bill O&#8217;Boyle </div></div><div class="metaInfo"><photo0>https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/web1_Oboyle_Bill-2-1-8.jpg</photo0><caption0>Bill O&#8217;Boyle </caption0><photoCredit0></photoCredit0></div></div>
<div class="metaInfo"><bylineMeta><p>By Bill O&#8217;Boyle</p><p>boboyle@www.timesleader.com</p></bylineMeta></div><div class="metaInfo"><shirttailMeta><p>Reach Bill O&#8217;Boyle at 570-991-6118 or on Twitter @TLBillOBoyle.</p></shirttailMeta></div>

Beyond the Byline: And there went the neighborhood