A Rankin County judge ruled Wednesday that the revocation of Gold Coast Commodities’ wastewater permit will stand.
In his ruling, Rankin County Chancery Court Judge Troy Odom said the state Permit Board was within its rights to revoke the permit due to a large amount of credible evidence and there was an insufficient basis that the board violated the state’s Open Meetings Act.
Gold Coast could appeal Odom’s ruling to the State Court of Appeals.
Gold Coast Commodities sued in Rankin County Chancery Court to try to get reinstated its wastewater permit to dispose of its wastewater at a lagoon in Pelahatchie. This permit was revoked by the Permit Board on November 10, 2020 in an action that was later supported by an evidentiary hearing in April, 2021.
Gold Coast uses a proprietary process to transform cooking oil and soapstock — which is a byproduct which originates from the refining of soybean and other oils — into animal feed and biodiesel using sulfuric acid. The wastewater from this process is extremely acidic and must be kept at a high temperature to prevent it from congealing into a pipe-clogging, malodorous sludge.
Odom said the board (through the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality’s investigation) not only papered the file adequately with substantial amounts of credible evidence to demonstrate cause for the permit revocation but ascended the mountain. He also said the amount of evidence showed the decision was neither capricious nor arbitrary, a key argument in the company’s filings in the case.
While the Mississippi Ethics Commission did sanction the board about the e-mails regarding the case as a violation of the state’s Open Meetings Act, Odom said in his decision that the appropriate remedy of a warning issued to the board was sufficient for the violation and didn’t justify throwing out the board’s permit revocation.
Gold Coast once disposed of its wastewater into Brandon’s sewer system, which the city in a 2019 lawsuit says caused damage to pipes. After the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality ordered Gold Coast to stop dumping in Brandon in 2016, they started trucking and then dumping wastewater into Jackson’s sewer system.
This led to a federal indictment of the contractor doing the dumping and a 2017 order from the MDEQ to cease the disposal. The city of Jackson filed a lawsuit in June.
Gold Coast then started trucking its wastewater to the lagoon in Pelahatchie and, according to filings by the Permit Board, were dumping their wastewater into the lagoons five months before required aerators were installed.
The lack of aerators led to oppressive odors from the lagoon and plague-like levels of flies, along with a 418,000-gallon spill into nearby Dry Creek that necessitated a water contract advisory by MDEQ.
The separate Mississippi Board of Environmental Quality held a hearing on November 19, 2020 that would allow Gold Coast to resume its operations upon satisfaction of certain conditions. The board also fined the company $505,000 for 11 violations of the state’s environmental laws.
