HUFFINGTON
06.17.12
OLD KING COAL
people in that part of the county
feel silenced, it’s not his fault.
“I’ve never not allowed them to
talk, but I’m not going to let you
talk about stuff you don’t know
about,” Turner says. “You don’t
know what you’re talking about,
so why should you get up and
dominate a meeting spreading
false information?”
Flowers’ take is less confrontational, but his attitude toward
local landfill opponents is clear.
“When you live in a community and they don’t have anything,
they don’t know how to go about
getting something,” he explains.
“If you’re in a little match box,
and you stay in that match box,
you can’t strike unless you get out
of that match box. Every match in
the match box can burn the world
up, but it won’t happen unless
you get out of the box. So these
people are in the box.”
The commission gave its imprimatur to the landfill proposal
in 2005, prompting citizens of
the Uniontown area to oust Flowers the following year and end his
18-year run on the commission. A
group of some of the area’s betteroff residents, many of them white,
also helped finance a lawsuit citing a variety of procedural violations in the permit process.
In June 2008, just six months
before the coal ash dam in Ten-
nessee would fail, a Montgomery
circuit court rejected the residents’ claims and found in favor
the commission and the site’s
owners — at that point a pair of
limited-liability companies known
as Perry Uniontown Ventures I,
which owned the land, and Perry
County Associates, which owned
the permit. Susan Copeland, a
Montgomery attorney who represented the residents, says the
owners must have had a high level
of confidence in the outcome:
They had spent the preceding
years bulldozing the site and preparing it for trash delivery.
Arrowhead opened for business
in 2007, before the court had even
issued a decision in the case.
CAN’T NOBODY TELL YOU
At the time of the Kingston coal
ash disaster, Uniontown itself was
in particularly dire straits. Creditors, including electric utilities,
were harassing the village, according to Mayor Jamaal Hunter and
county commissioner Turner, and
both the state of Alabama and the
federal Internal Revenue Service
had placed liens on the city’s tax
revenues. Uniontown was also
facing action from ADEM officials
over its sewer system, which was
failing due to lack of maintenance.
According to the EPA, which
was overseeing TVA’s emergency