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HAZARDOUS WASTE FACILITY SITING: COMMUNITY, FIRM, AND 133 GOVERNMENTAL PERSPECTIVES original typesetting files. Page breaks are true to the original; line lengths, word breaks, heading styles, and other typesetting-specific formatting, however, cannot be About this PDF file: This new digital representation of the original work has been recomposed from XML files created from the original paper book, not from the retained, and some typographic errors may have been accidentally inserted. Please use the print version of this publication as the authoritative version for attribution. MAJOR APPROACHES TO SITING: A CRITIQUE Various approaches are available for siting hazardous waste facilities. Several have clearly dominated the programs developed by states and the federal government over the past decade. Here the major options are set forth, with attention to the validity of underlying assumptions. Approach 1: Locational Opportunism Historically, unwanted facilities have often been sited by a developer who has surveyed the candidate sites and, once having met various substantive locational needs (available land, accessibility, physical site properties, etc.), has sought those places where the inclination or ability to resist is minimal. These are often communities that are rural and small, where unemployment is high and income low, where connection to the centers of political power is weak. Residents of such places are more likely to trade safety or environmental quality for material gainâthrough jobs, increased tax revenues, and improved services. Places to be avoided are communities with high standards of living, for whose residents new jobs associated with a waste facility have less appeal, where safety and environmental quality are highly valued, and which have an organized capacity to resist the siting and possess ready access to political power. In short, a political marketplace allocates sites for unwanted facilities. That locational opportunism has operated in hazardous waste facility siting is apparent in a recent study that examined New Jersey towns with abandoned hazardous waste sites and compared them with towns lacking such sites (Greenberg et al., 1984). The results were unambiguous. The communities without abandoned waste sites had more affluent populations; those with such sites had a higher percentage of younger, older, black, and foreign-born people. In fact, socioeconomic status of communities was the most consistent relationship uncovered (Greenberg et al., 1984, p. 390). This opportunistic siting strategy is not simply the creature of an unhappy past. Why not, it may be asked, scout out those places where people have outstretched arms and, as long as technical siting requirements are observed, put the facility there, thereby avoiding the enervating conflicts with communities that do not want the facility? This clearly was the strategy of Precision, Conversion and Recovery, Inc. of New Jersey in planning a major hazardous waste incineration facility. The company adopted technical site-suitability criteria but unabashedly added a formal criterion that "the site should ideally be located in an economically depressed area to enhance the attraction of added employment and of the municipal 5 percent gross receipt tax allowed in the (New Jersey) siting act" (Jensen, 1984). Such thinking is quite appar
