Balanced News: Chicago neighborhood groups sue US Army Corps of Engineers over expansion of a polluted dump

The community groups from Chicago’s Southeast Side are filing a lawsuit against the US Army Corps of Engineers, alleging that plans to expand a lakefront dump filled with polluted sediment are violating national environmental laws. The dump is a repository of both polluted and unpolluted sediment that has been dredged from a series of rivers and canals that connect Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River. In 1984, Illinois passed a law converting the land, submerged in Lake Michigan, into an in-water confined disposal facility where all of the dredged sediment would go. But the law stipulated that once the facility was full the land should be handed over to the Chicago Parks Department to be turned into a public park. But after decades, the plan to clean up the site and install a park has yet to be executed. The facility’s current location sits next to a park and a beach. The community groups are fighting back and say “no more.”