Central KY community celebrates getting garbage dump moved out of Black neighborhood
For several years, residents of Paris’ Westside neighborhood have been working to get the town’s garbage transfer station moved out of their predominantly Black community.
They’ve succeeded.
A new Paris transfer station is set to open early this spring on property donated by the Bourbon County Fiscal Court.
On Saturday, community members packed a room at the Paris-Bourbon County Public Library to celebrate their success by screening a short film about the grassroots neighborhood movement that has made it possible.
“It was an environmental injustice issue,” Anna Allen-Edwards, a former city commissioner who helped get the movement started, said of the transfer station’s placement. “You wouldn’t have just done it in anybody else’s neighborhood.”
Getting the “dump” moved out of the neighborhood has been a long time coming. In 1965, Paris placed a garbage incinerator in the Westside neighborhood, in an area that had once been a park.
EHI Planning Consultants, which has helped the city and community with the project, estimated that more than 30 garbage trucks a day drive through the neighborhood to get to the transfer station.
Allen-Edwards said community members attended more than 50 neighborhood meetings to get the transfer station moved.
The brief documentary-style film shown Saturday described the effort. The film was funded by Groundwork USA, a nonprofit focused on “undoing legacies of poverty and racial discrimination” through environmental work in communities where those legacies have caused problems.
“It’s going to be able to help us get our message out,” said Bill Alverson, a retired CEO of a local bank who has worked with the community to help lead the project, said of the film.
After screening the mini documentary, attendees heard updates from many of the principal people who worked on the project about what may come next for the neighborhood.
“We’re just at the first step of this project,” said Paris City Manager Jamie Miller.
Vanessa Logan, who has helped lead the community effort and serves as president of the Paris Westside Neighborhood Association, said officials are waiting to hear results regarding the level of contamination that will be left behind by the transfer station.
She said community members would like to see the site outfitted with shelters, an amphitheater, playgrounds, a community center, walking trails and benches.
“They want to do fishing and kayaking down at the creek,” she said.
Allen-Edwards said the community also hopes the revitalization will go beyond the transfer station site.
“We want to start rehabbing houses,” she said.
In addition to helping older residents make repairs to their homes, Alverson said the community needs new affordable housing too.
A sponsorship fund has been set up through the Blue Grass Community Foundation to help support the ongoing work.
“We don’t know how much to ask for. We just know we’re going to need some money,” he said.
Allen-Edwards said the neighborhood also needs infrastructure improvements, such as sidewalks.
And she said a plan for an “overlay” is in the works that would help protect the character of the neighborhood as new homes are added or old ones are renovated.
Her sister Edwina Allen Smarr, who grew up in the Westside neighborhood, said “it started as a beautiful neighborhood” with lots of children and well-maintained homes.
Over the years, with a dump just across the way and garbage trucks driving through daily, she said that changed.
Smarr said she thinks the new transfer station is “the start of good things,” including improved health of those living near the site.
As requested by the event’s organizers, Smarr wrote a long list of names of former Westside residents who are now deceased. She said she wished they could have seen the change happen.
“Everybody prayed for change,” she said.
On Saturday, she was wearing a shirt that she said was appropriate to the occasion.
It read, “There was no way, but God made a way.”
