A $173 million price tag on an ecological disaster has done nothing to inspire urgency. Across Chesterfield County, residents are being asked to fund new schools while a catastrophic environmental failure quietly leaks leachate into local waterways and the Chesapeake Bay.

For years, the county administration and the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) have failed to maintain timely disclosures of emissions, leaks, and the reality residents who live near Shoosmith Landfill experience every day.

Though federal indictments have finally targeted the landfill’s former operators, this was fundamentally a state-supervised failure. Why did local and state authorities allow toxic leachate to pour out unchecked into the environment before taking action or regulating?

Long before the local government acknowledged the severity of the crisis, the Chesterfield Citizens for Responsible Government (CCRG) were hard at work. This group of private citizens were instrumental in investigating the threat, meeting with local authorities, and quietly collaborating with national reporters like Bloomberg’s Laura Bliss to help alert us all to the threat Chesterfield would just as soon ignore.

While local officials and state agencies stonewalled, CCRG was doing the heavy lifting to expose missing funds, a distressed landfill system, a polluted ecosystem, and they did it all by the numbers.

CCRG posts their work on their site to give Chesterfield residents what the government won’t, transparency.

Laura Bliss has tracked distressed landfills nationwide, placing Shoosmith at the top of the list of dangerous sites. National media coverage has exposed what the General Assembly and local media outlets chose to ignore for years.

Now that the spill is national news, politicians are rushing to sign onto legislative efforts. They are calling in local media outlets reliant on their generous political ad budgets to ride the coattails of trending investigations.

I’ll name names because I’ve dealt with the stale efforts of my State Senator, Senator Sturtevant. It’s no surprise to see his belated arrival to the fight, eagerly claiming credit for groundwork laid by independent watchdogs like CCRG and journalists like Bliss. It is a glaring case of political coattail-riding that insults the hard work of actual investigators.

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On the regulatory side, we have the Department of Enviornmental Quality flat out falling short. In contrast DEQ’s Mike Roland’s assurances to the Board of Supervisors that the situation was “contained,” a recent August 2026 report is missing from the DEQ’s Shoosmith web disclosures.

What is obvious in those reports is that authorities have a very long history of complaints from residents leading back more than 9 years. They also are behind in disclosing recent reports.

As members of CCRG highlighted on our podcast, hauling costs for leachate have skyrocketed from two cents to twenty-two cents per gallon, rendering the current cleanup model financially unsustainable as there are nearly 400,000 gallons physically hauled from the dump for treatment each week.

While these ballooning costs could be mitigated by constructing a local pre-treatment facility, Chesterfield County and the DEQ refuse to invest, choosing instead to wait for time in the already overcommitted General Assembly or for Governor Abigail Spanberger and state legislators to issue emergency funds.

CCRG asserts that Chesterfield County has the fiscal capacity through its credit rating to finance a pre-treatment plant and permanently check the disaster. Doing so would protect residents and halt the steady stream of leachate referred to as “black goo” from threatening Swift Creek, the James River, and the Chesapeake Bay.

Instead, Chesterfield continues to shield the connected. This insular culture matches what we have found in our other reports on systemic construction fraud. Whether it is inaction and silence by Commonwealth’s Attorney Erin Barr or administrative stonewalling by the office of the Governor who refuses to engage with constituents demanding answers, regulation is failing and constituents are being ignored.

The failures are systemic and ongoing.

The Information Blackout: A persistent refusal to provide transparent, complete reporting on spills, temperatures, and toxic emissions.

Priorities Over People: County leadership continues to delay emergency remediation while raising taxes for non-emergency improvements and capital projects.

Administrative Inertia: State regulators continue to claim containment, ignoring the firsthand accounts and health consequences reported by residents living in the radius of Shoosmith.

Chesterfield can’t continue to act as if we live in 1976. Regulations and ecological responsibility are minimum standards, not suggestions.

Listen to the podcast where we discuss this and other issues in Chesterfield.

What are your thoughts on the Shoosmith landfill disaster and how long it’s taking for anyone to do anything about it?