Chicago won an appeal Friday reinstating a ruling that barred an influential company from opening a metal-shredding plant in the heavily polluted southeast neighborhood.
In 2022, Mayor Lori Lightfoot denied Reserve Management Group a permit for the South Deering crusher amid an outcry from activists and federal officials over environmental concerns. But last year, the Ohio-based company won a ruling from an administrative court that Lightfoot had overstepped her bounds.
Judge Allen P. Walker’s decision Friday to side with the city in its appeal once again casts doubt on the future of RMG’s Southside Recycling business.
Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration said Friday only that it was “pleased” with the reversal, but declined to comment further on what it called “ongoing litigation” in a statement from Justice Department spokeswoman Kristen Cabanban.
Southside Recycling “strongly disagrees” with the appealable decision and has vowed to continue to challenge it, spokesman Randall Samborn said in a statement. In a separate lawsuit, Southside Recycling is suing the city for damages related to the permit battle, he added.
“This decision effectively gives city officials carte blanche to inject politics, without any safeguards, into what is supposed to be an apolitical permitting process, and it makes the city an unreliable business partner, regardless of the risk to taxpayers,” Samborn said.
Lightfoot had originally negotiated with RMG to open the Southeast Side plant in exchange for closing the often-troubled General Iron plant along the North Branch of the Chicago River near the wealthy, mostly white Lincoln Park neighborhood.
But the pressure intensified as President Joe Biden’s administration urged Lightfoot to consider how the region’s existing pollution problems “embodied the problem of environmental injustice” in low-income, predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods.
Also facing a federal civil rights investigation and intense opposition from community activists, some of whom went on hunger strike, Lightfoot rejected an RMG permit, leaving the company with piles of flattened cars, twisted rebar and used machinery surrounding an idled machine it had built along the Calumet River.
“The concerns about the past and the potential failure of society are too important to ignore,” Dr. Allison Arwady, then the city’s health commissioner, said at the time.
Administrative law judge Mitchell Ex overturned Lightfoot’s decision in June 2023, citing a city consultant’s conclusion that the crusher would not pose unacceptable cancer risks as defined by federal authorities.
“It would be unfair and unjust for the City to impose unforeseen requirements at the last minute of the regulatory process to thwart Southside Recycling’s good faith in obtaining the City’s approval to build the (Southeast Side) facility,” Ex wrote in his opinion.
The city, then under Johnson’s leadership, appealed the decision days later.
Walker ruled Friday that the city’s Department of Public Health was within its rights to assess RMG’s alleged health violations because it initially blocked the company’s permit. He ruled that the administrative law judge did not adequately review the city’s health impact assessment.
The analysis identified “significant health risks” associated with the facility to which the Southeast Side would be “particularly exposed” 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 to protect public health,” he added.
Alice Yin, Gregory Pratt and Michael Hawthorne contributed.
jsheridan@chicagotribune.com
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