By VICKI URBANIK

The Porter County Commissioners have said it before, and on Tuesday, they said it again: They will not grant a waste transfer station proposed on the Porter-LaPorte County Line Road the required driveway permit.

The commissioners unanimously upheld their original May, 2005 decision by rejecting a recently submitted driveway permit application submitted on behalf of the Great Lakes Transfer Station and Sean Bleiden and property owner Darren Kaletha.

The Indiana Department of Environmental Management has granted the transfer station the required permit, but the station still needs a Porter County-issued driveway permit.

The commissioners approved a letter, to be sent today to the attorneys representing the waste transfer station, by County Engineer Dave Schelling, who returned the $40 application fee because the driveway permit was denied.

“There really isn’t a significant difference between this permit application and the previous applications for this location,” Schelling wrote.

Schelling told the commissioners Tuesday that the most recent permit application is faulty, since it lacks a detailed drawing and even leaves out the adjacent railroad tracks. Further, he noted that he spoke at the September, 2005 IDEM public hearing on the waste station permit, but that none of his concerns raised then have been addressed.

The county commissioners have primarily been concerned with the condition of County Line Road. Although the waste station is to be on the LaPorte County side of the road, Porter County is responsible for the road maintenance. County officials have said the road is in poor shape as it is and cannot handle heavy truck traffic to and from a waste station. They have also raised safety concerns about heavy truck traffic.

“The road is posted 10 tons due to the very poor load carrying capacity of the soil under the road,” Schelling’s letter reads. “The road can carry an occasional over weight load, but will be destroyed with repeated heavy loads.”

Schelling’s letter also noted that any vehicles more than 10 tons using County Line Road would have to obtain an overweight permit from the county highway department. But, he wrote, no such permit was requested or obtained for the concrete or the crane that was used to build a cell tower at the waste transfer station site.

“The track record is not good at this location,” the letter says.

Posted 4/18/2007