CLINTON – At an obscure landfill in central Illinois, a plan to store toxic waste is raising a dispute over how much say neighboring towns and counties should have over what gets dumped above the water they drink.

If the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency signs off, a privately owned landfill just south of Clinton will become the permanent storage site for heavy concentrations of PCBs from throughout the Great Lakes region, toxic remnants of the Midwest's manufacturing glory days.

The landfill sits over the Mahomet Aquifer, a 150-mile long subterranean mass of saturated sand and gravel that provides drinking water for about three-quarters of a million people in central Illinois. Many of the towns and counties that use it complain they have had no say in the PCBs plan approved by DeWitt County five years ago.