The city acted within its rights to deny a permit for the relocated General Iron car-shredding operation on the Southeast Side in early 2022, especially considering the potential health impacts from additional air pollution, a judge ruled Friday.
Cook County Circuit Judge Allen Walker reversed a decision made last year by an administrative court that found the city didn’t follow its own rules when it denied the metal-shredding operation to open at East 116th Street along the Calumet River. The owner of the operation, now rebranded as Southside Recycling, plans to appeal the decision and is pursuing hundreds of millions of dollars in damages for lost business and other costs in a separate court case.
Walker struck down multiple legal arguments made by the business owner, including that a health impact assessment of the Southeast Side used as a basis for denying the permit was unjustified. Former Chicago Public Health Commissioner Allison Arwady cited the analysis as a cause for denial, noting health and other social stresses in an already heavily industrial area.
“The commissioner’s decision to deny the permit, therefore, was not arbitrary but grounded in substantive data and analysis,” Walker wrote.
He added that the assessment “highlighted significant health risks associated with the proposed facility. The Southeast Side is particularly susceptible to the potential health impacts.”
Former Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration signed a two-page agreement in 2019 with the owners of the business to move the General Iron scrap-metal operation from its longtime home in Lincoln Park to the Southeast Side location.
That move prompted strong protests from community, health and environmental advocates and spurred a federal investigation and a finding that the city violated the civil rights of residents by helping place polluters in the low-income Black and Brown communities where air quality already was poor and neighbors already were inundated by health stresses.
On her last day in office, Lightfoot signed an agreement with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development promising to reform its practices and make its planning, zoning and land-use practices less discriminatory.
Mayor Brandon Johnson has pledged to abide by the HUD agreement and filed the challenge to the administrative court last year. “The city is pleased” with the decision, Johnson’s Law Department said in a short statement.
The scrap-metal business is now owned by a partnership led by Reserve Management Group, which said in a statement that the administrative court “exposed the city’s failure to follow its own rules and ordinances” and claimed politics drove Lightfoot’s decision.
“The ruling effectively gives city officials carte blanche to inject politics, without any guardrails, into what is supposed to be an apolitical permitting process,” the statement added.
Reserve Management was so confident it would get the necessary approvals to operate, it built a new metal-shredder at the Southeast Side site.
The Southeast Environmental Task Force and People for Community Recovery, groups that opposed the operation, said the equipment should be dismantled.
“General Iron will never have the permission of our community to put our health at risk,” the groups said in a statement.