City considers natural gas connections ban in new buildings

By SAMANTHA STEVENS

daily senior staffer @its_samstevens

Evanston is considering a ban on natural gas connections in new building construction.

The ban, if enacted, would follow similar policies implemented in cities like Seattle and New York City. It would also help Evanston reach its goal of carbon neutrality for municipal operations by 2035, under the city’s Zero Emissions Strategy.

According to the city website, Mayor Daniel Biss made a referral for the ban to the Environment Board in January.

Evanston Sustainability and Resilience Coordinator Cara Pratt said the Environment Board plans to discuss it in its March meeting.

She added that the city hopes to bring a draft of the ban to the board within the next year.

“We really want to hear people’s opinions about this, so we’re bringing it to the Environment Board first to have a plan for community engagement, whether that’s public meetings or a survey,” Pratt said. Evanston’s consideration to ban new natural gas connections sits in the backdrop of a national conversation around the harmful health effects of burning natural gas.

While many residential appliances — like gas-powered furnaces and water heaters — vent pollution outside, gas-burning stoves emit pollutants into the home, which can cause or worsen respiratory illnesses. A study published in December 2022 estimated that gas-burning stoves are responsible for 12.7% of childhood asthma cases in the U.S.

Nathan Kipnis, principal at Kipnis Architecture + Planning, said banning natural gas connections is a step in the right direction to improving both indoor and outdoor air quality.

“(The move away from natural gas) has been coming for years,” Kipnis said. “It’s a benefit all the way around. It’s better for the occupants of the building, and it’s lower energy.”

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, almost eight in 10 Illinois households use natural gas for heating.

Pratt said a potential ban would not impact previously-installed appliances.

“I feel like it’s important to distinguish between what we’re trying to do — which is to have a conversation about the potential of banning new natural gas connections in new construction — versus the social media conversation about banning gas stoves,” Pratt said. “It’s two very different things.”

At the same time, many existing structures are shifting from gas to electric appliances. Will Gutierrez, a partner at HVAC business The Rayes Group, said his company installed three times as many hybrid HVAC systems in 2022 than in 2021 because of rising customer demand.

While there are environmental and health benefits to using electricity over natural gas, initial costs can be a barrier for residents looking to install new appliances like HVAC, especially if they are electric.

Gutierrez said he estimates that the cost of installing an electric heat pump is roughly double that of a gas-powered AC unit.

“You’re paying more for better technology,” samanthastevens2024@u.northwestern.edu station sorts and compacts the waste, which is then taken by larger vehicles to a final disposal site elsewhere, like a landfill.

Gutierrez said.

But not all appliances have significant price point differences between the natural gas option and the electrical alternative. For instance, gas stoves and electric stoves are similarly priced, although operational costs depend on natural gas and electricity prices.

Gutierrez said solutions like a hybrid HVAC system can be a halfway point for residents who are seeking to upgrade their appliances but may not be able to switch to an entirely electrically powered residence.

A hybrid HVAC system relies primarily on an electrical heat pump. If the temperature outside is too cold for the pump to properly function, the system reverts to a traditional “backup” furnace.

Kipnis said although switching to electric appliances may add costs to the residents, it is the right thing to do.

“Either we have a world that continues to use the cheapest solution and gets destroyed, or we pay a little bit more and we do it correctly,” he said.

By putting smaller, compacted loads onto larger vehicles, companies reduce hauling costs, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. And because the station is a private business, it operates independently from the city, according to Cara Pratt, Evanston’s sustainability and resilience coordinator.

“The station has no affiliation whatsoever with the city,” Pratt said.

Getting around zoning laws

Illinois state law requires waste transfer stations be located at least 1,000 feet away from the nearest residential area, creating a buffer zone. But that law, which went into effect in the ’90s, included a grandfather clause exempting older stations, like the one on Church Street.

Waste transfer stations are sources of air pollution and present dangers to public health, including excessive noise, smells and increased traffic from trucks, according to the Community & Environmental Defense Services, a national networking group that helps citizens with zoning issues in cases with environmental or land use concerns.

Citizens’ Greener Evanston committee member Janet Alexander Davis, a lifelong Evanston resident, said she’s frustrated by the station’s exemption from newer zoning regulations.

“What I’ve learned over the years is that garbage is big business,” Davis said. “Today, it would even be illegal to (have the station). But yet, people have to live with something (like that).”

If a company asked to build an industrial property near a residential area now, Pratt said the city’s answer would be no.

Historical activism around the station

The station began as a small, family-owned garbage dump that handled mostly Evanston-generated solid waste. Then in 1984, the Illinois EPA established the site as a waste transfer station.

Davis said the station originally held strong connections with the community because the business used to employ more people from the neighborhood.

“It was family-owned, and the people were really nice,” Davis said. “They made good money. It was a business, and we left it alone.”

Since then, several international companies have managed the station: Onyx Waste Services, which became Veolia Environmental Services in 2006; and Advanced Disposal and WM, which acquired Advanced Disposal in 2020.

Under WM, Levitt said she doesn’t know anyone the station currently employs. Davis said she doesn’t think these international companies share the same commitment to the community.

“All over the world, they make a ton of money,” Davis said. “I doubt it will ever change — if it will ever move.”

Lisa Disbrow, WM’s director of government and public affairs for the Illinois-Missouri Valley area, said the station’s staff does not live in Evanston but in nearby communities in an email statement to The Daily.

Davis said activism surrounding the station increased when more white people moved into the 5th Ward near the waste transfer station.

When she began learning about the transfer station, Levitt said she spoke to locals who questioned her intentions as a white person moving into the neighborhood. Some wanted to keep the station because of its historical ties to the community, Levitt said.

Connecting to the community helped her understand the historical context, she said.

In about 2011, community group Evanston Neighbors United began picketing outside the station, Davis said.

“It was a small group of Black and white people who got together,” Davis said. “We went out. We met and talked about getting rid of the station.”

But legal battles between the station’s then-managing company Veolia and the city made activism efforts difficult, Levitt said.

Between June and September 2010, the city issued five citations against the station for strong garbage smells, only two of which Veolia had paid by 2012. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, fewer than half of all air pollution citations against Chicago businesses end up getting paid.

In 2011, Veolia filed a complaint against Evanston, alleging the city enacted illegal fees and conducted unreasonable inspections.

In more recent years, activism surrounding the station decreased due to these legal disputes, Levitt said.

“We were told we couldn’t block (the waste transfer station) from conducting business or we could be accused of tortious interference, which is recklessly interfering with business operations,” Levitt said. “They pulled out some of their corporate lawyers.”

Concerns about health risks persist

In 2019, the city conducted a six-month study to assess the air quality around the waste transfer station. The city partnered with U.S. EPA Region 5 — which serves Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Wisconsin and 35 Indigenous tribes — and hired environmental consulting firm RHP Risk Management to run the study.

RHP Risk Management looked at 12 pollutants. As a preliminary study, the examination did not reach any conclusions but did note formaldehyde and nitric oxide was of greatest interest for follow-ups.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer classified formaldehyde as carcinogenic to humans in 2004. Nitric oxide is a respiratory irritant, according to the RHP Risk Management report.

In a 2021 follow-up email to the city, U.S. EPA

Region 5 recommended the city focus resources on assuring the implementation of best practices at the station.

But if the city wanted to evaluate concentrations of formaldehyde, the EPA recommended further sampling, which would cost $300 a sample, Pratt said.

Since the study, the city has not been able to implement any new policies, Pratt said.

“(The city doesn’t) have funding for this,” Pratt said. “We don’t have authority to change the practices of the waste transfer station in a tangible way because it’s the state that regulates an entity like that.”

Jo Ann Flores-Deter, who lives in a house behind the station, said the preliminary study wasn’t enough. The state and city need to conduct further investigation, Flores-Deter said, because the station is in a neighborhood — not on the outskirts of town.

Davis said the city needs to better explain the results of the study to residents and do further monitoring.

“Unless you have people who really understand that report and know what to do going forward, the report is just there,” Davis said.

Ald. Bobby Burns (5th) said industrial zones should be more distanced from residential neighborhoods as they are legally required now. That way, the business activity would have a less disruptive effect, he said.

On a semi-regular basis, Burns meets with community members to find solutions regarding the station, he said. Because of that, Davis said she is hopeful for the future.

“It’s always better to go together and organize likeminded people with similar concerns and issues,” Burns said. “Then, work collectively with the community to come up with solutions.” jessicama2025@u.northwestern.edu should graduate with advanced skills in writing and communication, and they should have had two serious engagements with … curriculum that focuses on issues of justice, power and equity.”

Eight years ago, students petitioned for a U.S.focused social inequalities and diversity curriculum in Weinberg, such as the new overlay. Finn said the committee added the complementing global course at the suggestion of faculty who had lived, studied and taught abroad.

The process of revising Weinberg requirements began in Winter Quarter 2016, when Weinberg Dean Adrian Randolph assembled an Ad Hoc Committee on Degree Requirements to review the current policies and survey faculty on potential changes. After more than a year of regular meetings, the committee submitted its final report in September 2017, proposing the foundational disciplines, overlays and a revisited writing requirement.

As part of the revised writing requirement, Fall Quarter first-year seminars will no longer require instructors to formally assess students’ writing skills at the end of the course.

Instead, students will take a first-year seminar of their choice, followed by a more writing-intensive seminar in the winter or spring quarters of their freshman year. This change aims to reduce the number of learning goals hinging on the Fall Quarter first-year seminar, according to the committee’s final report.

Faculty in the Cook Family Writing Program will spearhead developing and teaching these courses, according to the report. The seminars may also allow English Department graduate students to gain additional teaching experience.

“A noteworthy reaction to this proposal was that the proposed first-year seminar structure shifts primary responsibility for the writing-intensive first-year seminars from departments and programs to the Writing Program,” the report stated. “This was viewed by some as ceding intellectual ownership and potentially treating writing as an isolated form of competence.”

Comparative literature Prof. Peter Fenves said while the subject areas seem largely the same among the foundational disciplines, he was initially concerned by the reframing of distribution requirements as “foundational.”

Fenves added that separating the subject areas into distinct disciplines seemed to contradict Weinberg’s interdisciplinary nature.

“Foundational … doesn’t seem to me to be a chord with a lot of the ways in which professors here understand what they’re doing with students, even in the classes basically oriented towards verybeginning students in that field,” Fenves said. “In studying something like literature or art, if you are competent in the language, anyone can step into the most advanced writing or art.” maiapandey@u.northwestern.edu

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