Chicago won an appeal Friday reinstating a decision to block a clout-heavy company from opening a metal shredding plant on the heavily polluted Southeast Side.
In 2022, Mayor Lori Lightfoot denied the Reserve Management Group’s permit for the South Deering shredder amid outcry from activists and federal authorities over environmental concerns. But the Ohio-based company won an administrative court’s decision last year determining Lightfoot had overstepped.
Judge Allen P. Walker’s decision Friday to side with the city in its appeal once again puts the future of RMG’s Southside Recycling operation in doubt.
Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration only said it “is pleased” about the reversal Friday, but declined to comment further on what it referred to as “ongoing litigation” in a statement from Department of Law spokesperson Kristen Cabanban.
Southside Recycling “strongly disagrees” with the appealable decision and promised to continue to fight it, spokesperson Randall Samborn said in a statement. In another lawsuit, Southside Recycling is suing the city for damages related to the permit fight, he added.
“The ruling effectively gives city officials carte blanche to inject politics, without any guardrails, into what is supposed to be an apolitical permitting process, and it renders the city an unreliable business partner, regardless of the risk to taxpayers,” Samborn said.
Lightfoot had originally brokered with RMG to open the Southeast Side facility in return for closing the company’s often-troubled General Iron operation along the North Branch of the Chicago River near the wealthy, mostly white Lincoln Park neighborhood.
But pressure mounted when President Joe Biden’s administration urged Lightfoot to consider how the area’s existing pollution issues “epitomize the problem of environmental injustice” in low-income, predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods.
Faced also with a federal civil rights investigation and intense opposition from community activists, some of whom staged a hunger strike, Lightfoot rejected an RMG permit, leaving the company with piles of flattened cars, twisted rebar and used appliances surrounding an idled machine it built along the Calumet River.
“Concerns about the company’s past and potential noncompliance are too significant to ignore,” Dr. Allison Arwady, then the city’s health commissioner, said at the time.
Administrative Law Judge Mitchell Ex vacated Lightfoot’s decision in June 2023, citing a city consultant’s conclusion that the shredder would not pose unacceptable cancer risks as defined by federal authorities.
“It would be unjust and unfair for the city to spring unforeseen requirements at the last minute of the regulatory process to thwart Southside Recycling’s good faith reliance on the city’s approval to construct the (Southeast Side) facility,” Ex wrote in his opinion.
The city, then under Johnson’s leadership, appealed the decision days later.
Walker determined Friday the city’s Department of Public Health was within its rights to weigh alleged health violations by RMG as it first blocked the company’s permit. He decided the administrative judge did not sufficiently examine the city’s health impact assessment.
The analysis highlighted “significant health risks” linked to the facility that the Southeast Side would be “particularly susceptible to” because of its high concentration of industrial facilities, Walker wrote.
The Lightfoot administration’s decision to block the permit was a “valid exercise of administrative discretion aimed at safeguarding public health,” he added.
jsheridan@chicagotribune.com
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