The question of who should pay to cleanup harmful industrial waste goes to VCAT today.
It’ll be posed by the Moorabool Shire when it attends the tribunal for a hearing against the Environment Protection Authority.
Council has been ordered by the EPA to clean up containers of industrial waste, illegally abandoned on a Crown road reserve managed on behalf of the state by council.
The likely cost of disposing the waste safely to ratepayers is estimated to be around half a million dollars.
In a statement, Mayor Paul Tatchell said the EPA had been monitoring these container loads full of industrial waste since at least late last year.
He says as a result of EPA inaction, they’re now claiming the waste is the responsibility of local ratepayers to remove and dispose of safely.
Council says they’re currently running a public awareness campaign targeting illegal dumping in the shire.
