Meeting Held In Washburn Over Nuclear Waste

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Meeting Held In Washburn Over Nuclear Waste

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By Jon Berg - email

The McClean County Courthouse gets heated this afternoon over nuclear and radioactive waste.

At a meeting this afternoon, the McLean County Planning and Zoning Commission agrees to change some of the language in the current ordinance.

Those changes are making some residents upset.

"Nuclear waste is not permitted and I'm proposing that we delete that language because it's obsolete," Ladd Erickson said.

McLean County State's Attorney Ladd Erickson says the county has no desire to possess or import Nuclear Waste, which is why he wants it deleted from the language.

Erickson says the purpose of changing this language is to develop a local zoning process for facilities that might come to town.

"So if some place determines they want to do a facility there's going to be a requirement to come to planning and zoning which probably doesn't exist right now," Erickson said.

Erickson says bringing Nuclear Waste to North Dakota is currently a federal crime, and that counties don't have control over it.

"North Dakota is not geographically setup for nuclear waste and we have no control over it either way if they actually wanted to put nuclear waste in North Dakota it's all federal, the zoning ordinances make no difference on that," Erickson said.

Some of those who attended the meeting say the commission should've tabled the discussion and studied the language further.

"Until the citizens of McLean County have a chance to understand what's really going on, we're throwing around all these rules of different classifications of different types of waste," Dennis Kost said.

Former Planning and Zoning Commissioner Robert Rasmusson agrees.

"I was very disappointed that they passed the ordinance today I figured they should have waited until next month to do it," Robert Rasmusson said.

But the commission didn't wait, commissioners voted unanimously in favor of the changes.

The decision is not yet final.

The county commission will make the final decision on passing the changed language to the ordinance at their next meeting, March 5th at 8:45 a.m.

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