The years-long fight over a proposed landfill near Dalton’s Forest Lake took another turn this week, as Casella Waste Systems withdrew a key state permit application tied to the contested North Country project. For the residents who have battled the plan over health, environmental, and economic concerns, the move felt like a rare moment of leverage. For the company, it was a procedural step, not a surrender.
According to the New Hampshire Bulletin, the withdrawal was announced Monday, June 15, in a letter from Casella to the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services. In that letter, Casella subsidiary Granite State Landfill, LLC said it would withdraw its application for a wetlands permit at the proposed site. The wetlands permit is one of several approvals the company would need before it could break ground on a facility near the lake, a body of water that anchors much of the surrounding community’s identity and recreation.
Why the Withdrawal Matters
The wetlands permit is not a minor formality. Because Casella would need it to move ahead in Dalton, opponents read the decision to pull the application as a step backward for the project, even if it was not framed that way by the company.
“(We are) never going to get the ‘you win, we lose’ letter from this company,” said Adam Finkel, a lakeside resident and one of the project’s most outspoken critics. “I think this is as close as we’re going to get.”
That cautious optimism reflects how grinding the Dalton fight has become. Residents and conservation groups have spent years contesting the proposal, arguing that a large landfill so close to Forest Lake threatens water quality, raises the specter of heavy truck traffic on rural roads, and could undercut property values across the region. Their persistence has turned a single permitting dispute into one of the defining environmental conflicts in northern New Hampshire.
Casella Says It Is Still Moving Forward
Casella, for its part, declined to characterize the withdrawal as a retreat. Jeff Weld, the company’s vice president of communications, said in an email statement that Casella expects the permitting process for Granite State Landfill to continue.
According to Weld, the company withdrew the wetlands application to avoid “confusion or inefficiency” in the permitting process while a separate, related solid waste permit works its way through an appeal. “Proceeding in this manner allows the relevant regulatory considerations to be addressed in a coordinated and consistent way,” Weld said.
He also pointed to what the company describes as a “demonstrated need for disposal capacity” in New Hampshire, citing the anticipated 2027 closure of a Casella landfill in nearby Bethlehem. The argument is central to Casella’s pitch: that the state will face a waste capacity crunch without new disposal sites, and that the North Country is a logical place to build one.
Anti-landfill activists dispute that framing. They argue that New Hampshire is not actually staring down a capacity shortfall, and that the “need” Casella describes is driven more by the company’s commercial interests, including the volume of out-of-state waste that flows into New Hampshire facilities, than by a genuine in-state emergency.
A Permit Process Tangled in Court
The withdrawal does not happen in a vacuum. Other Casella applications connected to the Dalton site remain unresolved. Chief among them is the company’s solid waste permit, which the Department of Environmental Services denied in 2025. Granite State Landfill appealed that denial and took the state to court, and that case is still underway.
That legal fight is the backdrop to this week’s news. By pulling the wetlands application now, Casella effectively pauses one track of the approval process while the bigger question of the solid waste permit plays out in the courts. The company’s path forward in Dalton will hinge largely on the outcome of those disputes, and on whether it later re-files for the wetlands permit it just withdrew.
Importantly, Casella explicitly reserved the right to resubmit the application in its Monday letter. This is not the first time the company has taken this route. Casella rescinded a wetlands permit application for the same site back in 2021, only to resubmit it later. That history is exactly why longtime opponents are tempering their celebration. They have watched the company step back before and return.
What It Means for the North Country
For Dalton and its neighbors, the practical effect of the withdrawal is more time, not certainty. The proposal is not dead, and the legal questions that will ultimately determine the project’s fate are far from settled. Residents who have organized against the landfill for years now find themselves in a familiar holding pattern, watching the courts and waiting to see whether a new wetlands application appears.
The Dalton dispute also sits within a much larger conversation in Concord about how New Hampshire manages its waste. Lawmakers have repeatedly wrestled with landfill siting, out-of-state trash, and the balance between disposal capacity and environmental protection. Earlier this year, the Senate opted to send a package of landfill measures to interim study rather than vote, a decision detailed in our report on how the Senate shelved five landfill bills. Separate legislation aimed at reshaping how landfill sites are evaluated has also moved through the State House, including the proposal covered in our look at HB 707 and the landfill site evaluation committee.
Those legislative efforts and the Dalton permitting saga are two sides of the same issue. While Concord debates the rules of the road, the on-the-ground reality plays out in towns like Dalton and Bethlehem, where the closure of older facilities and the push for new ones keeps the pressure on rural communities. For now, Forest Lake’s defenders have bought themselves another round in a fight that shows no sign of ending.
