‘We Do Matter’: West End Residents Tell DEP to Deny Natural Soil Products Permit

They don’t open their windows. They don’t hang out their wash. Some wake at 3 a.m. unable to breathe, and one woman keeps a notebook of every complaint she’s had to call in.

On Thursday night, about 100 of them packed the Tremont Municipal Building and told the state to deny Natural Soil Products’ permit renewal.

“It is an ammonia smell,” said Patricia Lucas, who lives about a mile from the plant in Joliett. “It’s as if a thousand cats urinated right there on my porch.”

The state Dept. of Environmental Protection held the hearing on two NSP applications: one to renew the permit for its biosolids composting operation, and one to let the company dry compost on four more concrete pads. Roger Bellas, who manages the Waste Management Program at DEP’s Northeast Regional Office, was among the DEP officials there. Victor Scomillio and Adam Koziol were there for NSP. Neither of them testified.

One by one, residents stood up and faced them.

Shirley Wagner hasn’t opened the windows of her Joliett home in three years. She has plastic over them, and it isn’t only for the wind.

“It’s to keep the stench out,” she said. “Nobody should have to do that.”

She was born and raised in Joliett and bought her home there in the 1970s, long before NSP or the landfills and plants that followed it to the West End. She’s heard the question too many times: why do you live there?

“I was here long before any of them came,” Wagner said.

Companies do their homework, she said. They know a low-income area can’t afford a long legal fight. Her voice broke as she finished.

“I am tired of being a sacrificial lamb for polluters to gain a profit at my expense,” Wagner said. “I, along with everyone else in this room, matter. We matter whether you believe it or not. We do matter.”

For years she has asked DEP to study the cumulative impact of everything dumped and burned on that end of the county. She asked again Thursday. Every time she asks, she said, “it just seems to go in one ear and out the other.”

Wendy Madenford came with a notebook. She never thought she’d keep a diary at her age, she said, but now she writes down every odor complaint she calls in to DEP. She has filled more than one.

She read a few entries out loud.

Sept. 17, 2024, 5:14 a.m.: the smell woke her. She had to shut off her air conditioner because it was pulling the odor into the house. Headache, itchy throat, coughing, itchy skin. She ended up breathing into a blanket and a pillow. By 5:35 a.m., two “crap trucks” were already creeping through town.

Oct. 4, 2024, 4:30 a.m.: the smell inside her house again. She lay back down with a blanket over her head until she couldn’t take it anymore and got up to call.

“I’m starting to feel like I would rather be dead than to have to live like this the rest of my life,” she read.

Moments later, the moderator told her she was out of time.

Madenford’s home in Good Spring sits 1.6 miles west of NSP’s entrance. She has lived there 34 years. Now she’s moving to Joliett.

“We no longer have a quality of life living there,” she said. “Our communities have been victimized long enough.”

Lara Wiscount of Tremont said people in town sniff the air before they step outside to find out whether it’s “tolerable enough to breathe.” The days that scare her most are the ones when she can’t smell anything and still tastes it in her mouth and throat.

“What exactly are we breathing in?” she asked. “What is getting into our lungs, and what are the potential long-term consequences to our health?”

She said she and her husband, Joe, have met with Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law group that represents communities for free, and that it’s considering taking up their fight.

“I would love to open my windows and smell the mountain,” Wiscount said. “We deserve clean air. We deserve answers. We deserve accountability. And we deserve better than what we’ve been living in.”

Joe Wiscount said they moved back from New Jersey for the mountain air.

“The New Jersey air smells better than this crap,” he said.

He thought back to the summer’s Canadian wildfire smoke, the day or two everyone stayed inside with burning eyes and canceled plans, and how much people complained about it.

“That’s what we deal with 200 to 250 days a year in Tremont,” he said.

He told the room about an older man with a walking stick he passed on a steep hill recently. The man told him he gets out to walk every day he can, when it doesn’t smell.

“That should not be how you base your outdoor activities,” Wiscount said.

He said calling DEP doesn’t help much. An inspector might show up an hour later, two hours later, or the next day, and by then the air has changed. He thanked the County Commissioners and Frailey Township, which he said passed a resolution opposing the renewal. He said he invited U.S. Rep. Dan Meuser, who showed no interest. And he asked Gov. Josh Shapiro to give NSP the same attention he gave to the fight against the proposed ICE detention center in Tremont Township.

He reminded DEP that protecting the environment is right there in its name.

“Choose people over profit,” Wiscount said.

Officials told DEP they’re as fed up as the people they represent.

County Commissioner Larry Padora said residents have come to commissioners’ meetings to complain about NSP 55 times since May 2022, and the County has no authority to stop it. The commissioners have taken the problem to Gov. Josh Shapiro directly and had DEP Secretary Jessica Shirley at the County to hear it. In August, all three commissioners asked DEP to deny the renewal.

“They have a right to open their windows,” Padora said. “They have a right to be able to enjoy their property.”

When he was first elected, he said, he was told NSP’s Gore system would fix everything.

“The Gore system has failed miserably,” Padora said. Now NSP wants to dry more waste out in the open on concrete pads. “Where’s that odor going to go? Into the air, into the community.”

“Give the County the power, the authority to deal with it, and we will,” he said.

State Rep. JoAnne Stehr, R-107, said she has taken the issue to the governor’s office and the top of DEP and been brushed off. An $8 million project at the plant didn’t fix it, she said. She once spent 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. at the facility, and the next morning the smell, like dead animals, was still in her car.

“The West End has been a dumping ground,” Stehr said. “I will be the voice of the people to say we’re done putting up with this.”

Drivers on Interstate 81 blame the smell on a landfill, she said.

“That’s not a landfill,” Stehr said. “That’s a human s— factory.”

She said NSP is “too damn cheap” to spend the money to do it right, and if DEP denies the permit, she’ll back it.

“We are done,” Stehr said. “Enough is enough.”

Christine Verdier, there for State Sen. Dave Argall, R-29, read the letter Argall sent Bellas on July 7. In it, Argall says NSP “has not been a good neighbor over the last several years.” He says a 2025 notice of violation found more than double the permitted amount of material on site, which he calls the root cause of the odors in Donaldson and Good Spring, and he writes that the odors “clearly show a pattern of disdain for their current permit parameters.”

One person spoke up for NSP.

Frank Krammes said he farms more than 700 acres of reclaimed strip mine land, and he couldn’t do it without NSP’s compost. The ground has almost no topsoil, he said. The wood chips in the compost break down and build soil there, and commercial fertilizer won’t work on it. He said the farm took no state, county, or taxpayer money, and asked DEP to renew the permit.

The room turned on him. People laughed at him and jeered, and a DEP moderator had to remind the crowd to respect everyone’s testimony and keep their composure.

Wagner answered him later.

“We are not an agricultural area,” she said. “What Frank does, in my opinion, harms us more than it does good.”

Tammy Saltzman of Good Spring called his testimony ridiculous. She said states around Pennsylvania are banning biosolids over forever chemicals, and that’s why the material ends up here.

“They tell you, ‘Oh, it’s okay, it’s free fertilizer,'” Saltzman said. “No, it’s not okay.”

She said the trucks are running up and down the road at 3 a.m. now.

“They’re trying to get more in because they’re scared they’re going to get closed down,” she said.

Krammes has piles all over the area that he hasn’t used, she said, and “they just sit there and sit there.”

“You just look at us like we’re dumb,” Saltzman told DEP.

Paul Zaharis of Joliett used to lease 120 acres of Krammes’ land for hunting. He said Krammes piled the material right up to the window of the hunting shack his father-in-law built, in a pile 15 to 20 feet high and 40 yards long.

“Who’s regulating his 700 acres?” Zaharis asked.

His wife, Lucas, has lived in Joliett most of her 53 years. Something changed about 10 years ago, she said. It got worse seven years ago, and the last four have been unbearable. She took her screens out because she won’t open her windows anymore. She won’t throw a picnic. On bad mornings, she’s afraid to go outside or let her dogs out.

“It’s not just a smell,” Lucas said. “It’s a life.”

Pamela Kramer-Schwartz, of Donaldson, hadn’t planned to speak, and she apologized for how she was dressed. She said she understood Saltzman’s frustration.

“I don’t feel very well today,” she said. “Surprise, surprise.”

She’s a registered nurse, and she listed what she said is in what they’re breathing: E. coli, salmonella, shigella, hepatitis, and norovirus. Anyone who thinks residents are exaggerating, she said, should have one truckload dumped on a block near their own home and then try opening a window or hanging out their clothes. The west end of the county, she said, always gets “the fuzzy end of the lollipop.”

Sarah Monger of Tremont, a health care worker, said she once followed a biosolids truck for seven minutes and smelled it the whole hour-long drive to Hershey. It was still in her car when she left work at 4 p.m. She has been at the plant for a fire, and said firefighters had to scrub their engine inside and out afterward.

She compared the West End to the miners who got black lung and the factory workers who got white lung.

“Are we just supposed to break our bodies for profit?” Monger asked. “Our children are leaving, and they are not coming back.”

Brianna DelValle of Orwigsburg told DEP she found a problem in NSP’s paperwork that the agency missed. She said the professional engineer whose seal is on NSP’s permit applications didn’t hold a valid license, and she was the one who reported it to the state.

“They’re doing an investigation at my request,” DelValle said.

She said the state let DEP know quickly. She also said she couldn’t find a valid commission for the notary who stamped the applications, other than one issued after they were filed, the same week the engineer switched his license to retired status.

“This is a joke,” DelValle said.

She said the application is also incomplete, because it leaves out Tully’s affiliated companies, its subcontractors, and its haulers.

“Why did I have to be the person that did that?” DelValle asked. “I don’t know why I’m the one looking this up and why DEP hasn’t.”

Sally Bair of Hegins Township said she raised the same concern in an email to DEP on July 29, asking whether a lapsed engineer’s seal on the applications was legal. She still hasn’t heard back.

Bair turned to the DEP table.

“Will someone answer us?” she asked.

DEP officials took testimony but didn’t answer questions from the crowd. At a similar public hearing in Saint Clair regarding BRADS Landfill, DEP officials told Coal Region Canary it’s the agency’s protocol to respond to questions and comments posed to it at these hearings when it issues a determination on the permit applications.

Speaker after speaker quoted the Environmental Rights Amendment in the state constitution, which promises Pennsylvanians the right to clean air and pure water. Melinda Deibert of North Manheim Township read it word for word.

“Stand up and do your job,” Deibert told DEP. “Do not renew this permit.”

Christopher Melusky of Norwegian Township asked DEP to confirm that all the public hearings and notices NSP’s application claims took place actually happened, and to weigh the County’s zoning case before making a decision.

“A permit is not an entitlement,” Melusky said. “A renewal is not a formality. And compliance with the law is not optional.”

NSP is owned by Tully Environmental of Flushing, N.Y. It runs a roughly 100-acre biosolids composting operation off Route 125 between Donaldson and Good Spring, in Frailey and Porter townships. Its own renewal application lists 87 DEP violations from 2007 to 2025. DEP fined the company $50,000 in 2023 after odor complaints.

The company’s next stop is the Schuylkill County Zoning Hearing Board. NSP is appealing the County’s Aug. 19 enforcement notice, which ordered it to apply for zoning permits after the fact for the biosolids operation and four buildings. The County says the only zoning permit on file is from 1992, for leaf and yard waste composting. NSP says the County has known about the operation since 1997.

The zoning hearing is at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 10, in Courtroom 7 of the Schuylkill County Courthouse in Pottsville. It’s open to the public.

Subscribe to Coal Region Canary

Get email updates from Coal Region Canary by becoming a subscriber today. Just enter your email address below to get started!

Support Coal Region Canary

Like our reporting and want to support truly local news in Schuylkill County? Your small donations help. For as little as $5, your contribution will allow us to cover more news that directly affects you. Consider donating today by hitting the big yellow button below ...