Part 115 · Materials Management Plans
A textual and structural analysis of Michigan Part 115
Does Part 115 of Michigan's Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Act limit a county Materials Management Plan's "minimum siting criteria" to maps, setbacks, zoning, and other purely geographic rules? Or may an MMP also require objective, facility-specific design and performance commitments -- such as monitoring capability, emergency planning, and corrective-action protocols -- as conditions for finding a proposed landfill or landfill expansion consistent with the plan?
The better reading is that Part 115 does not confine minimum siting criteria to geography. The statute requires every locally prepared MMP to contain a siting process with "a set of minimum criteria," but it does not modify that phrase with "geographic," "locational," "zoning," or a closed list of permissible subjects. It then makes satisfaction of those criteria part of the legal test for whether a proposed facility is consistent with the MMP. For a facility requiring a construction permit or operating license, EGLE must independently evaluate that consistency during its permit or license review.
That structure supports objective, facility-specific conditions tied to the proposed development -- including the design, equipment, plans, and enforceable commitments through which the facility will be constructed and safely operated. The fact that a criterion is more protective or adds a requirement beyond a statewide floor does not, by itself, create a conflict. Michigan conflict-preemption doctrine distinguishes an additional compatible condition from a rule that forbids what state law affirmatively permits or authorizes what state law forbids.
There is an important boundary. Additivity is not a complete answer by itself. A county must still act within the authority Part 115 delegates, and a criterion must have a genuine relationship to siting or development. The strongest formulation is therefore not that the county will inspect, direct, or punish ongoing landfill operations. It is that an applicant must demonstrate, before receiving a consistency determination for a new landfill or expansion, that the proposed development incorporates specified objective protections, with EGLE retaining permitting, technical review, inspection, and enforcement authority.
No reported Michigan appellate decision located as of this writing construes the scope of the new MMP minimum-criteria provisions enacted by 2022 PA 250. The position is therefore a substantial textual argument, not a settled judicial holding.
The relevant provisions form a coordinated decision system:
This is not an advisory county wish list. Nor is it a grant of county enforcement jurisdiction over landfills. It is a locally authored, state-approved planning instrument that supplies part of the decisional rule for a state permit or license. The local entity applies it first; EGLE must then read the same MMP and independently apply it to the applicant's documentation. That structure has an important drafting consequence: the MMP's criteria must be sufficiently clear, objective, and administrable for EGLE to determine what they require. Ambiguous criteria invite inconsistent interpretations, unexplained departures, and uneven permit decisions -- the very problems an objective written consistency standard should prevent.
The textual starting point is MCL 324.11579(1). The Legislature could have required "minimum geographic criteria," "minimum location criteria," or compliance with zoning and specified setbacks. It did not. It chose the broader phrase "a set of minimum criteria."
That omission matters because nearby provisions show that the Legislature knew how to write narrowly when it wanted to do so. MCL 324.11555(5), for example, expressly addresses more restrictive local location requirements for certain composting facilities. MCL 324.11578(3) uses precise distance-based distinctions -- two miles for a proposed landfill and one mile for certain other facilities -- when prescribing notice to an adjacent municipality. The Legislature's use of specific locational language in those provisions, but not in MCL 324.11579(1), weighs against silently inserting a geography-only limit into "minimum criteria."
The larger consistency section reinforces the point. MCL 324.11585(1) creates a distinct zoning-based route for certain disposal areas that do not require a Part 115 license or permit and for materials-utilization facilities. MCL 324.11585(3) separately creates the minimum-criteria route for a materials management facility that is not automatically consistent. If the latter route meant only ordinary zoning and geography, much of the separate statutory treatment would be duplicative.
The word "development" also reaches farther than latitude and longitude. Part 115 repeatedly applies the siting system to a proposed facility or expansion. A landfill expansion may remain on the same parcel while changing the footprint, elevation, engineering, capacity, environmental controls, and risk profile. Indeed, the transition provision expressly says proposed landfill expansions must follow the existing plan's siting process until a new MMP is approved. MCL 324.11508(2)(b). A reading that reduces "siting" to choosing a point on a map does not comfortably account for regulation of development at a location already fixed.
The construction-permit provisions point in the same direction. MCL 324.11510(2)(d) directs EGLE to review the proposed disposal area's "site, plans, and application," allows a construction permit to contain a stipulation specifically applicable to the "site and operation," and treats an expansion, capacity enlargement, boundary change, or conversion to a different disposal-area type as a new proposal requiring a new construction permit. That provision does not define MMP authority, but it confirms that the statutory concept of proposed landfill development is not exhausted by the parcel's location.
Accordingly, "siting" supplies an outer boundary, but not a geography-only definition. A criterion should govern whether and on what development conditions a proposed facility or expansion may be found consistent. Design features, monitoring infrastructure, emergency-response plans, and commitments incorporated into the proposed development can fit that role even though they have consequences after operations begin. Setbacks, buffers, stormwater structures, and gas-control systems also continue to matter after opening; duration does not transform a development condition into an unauthorized county inspection program.
The division of responsibility appears deliberate.
The planning committee must identify "relevant local materials management policies and priorities" and direct the DPA's preparation of the MMP. MCL 324.11573(a), (c). The DPA prepares the plan through consultation with municipalities, facility operators, neighboring counties, and the public. MCL 324.11574. County and municipal approvals precede EGLE's approval, and EGLE must approve a submitted MMP if it complies with Part 115. MCL 324.11575.
At the project stage, the CAA or designated entity makes a written consistency determination. MCL 324.11585(3)-(4). EGLE then conducts its own independent evaluation as part of the applicable registration, general-permit, construction-permit, or operating-license review. MCL 324.11585(5). The applicant, not the county, must place consistency documentation in the state application.
The necessary implication is that EGLE must consult and apply the applicable county's approved MMP when reviewing a covered facility. Those plans need not contain identical criteria. EGLE's January 2026 siting guide confirms that the siting process and criteria "may differ by facility type and/or county" and should be "objective and measurable." The guide also tells planners to "[a]dd additional appropriate criteria as needed." Although guidance is not binding law and does not specifically approve operational standards, it strongly refutes the premise that every county must use a single closed statewide list of factors.
This system permits local variation while preserving statewide administration:
That is shared decision architecture, not county usurpation of EGLE's police power.
MCL 324.11583 states three circumstances in which a local ordinance, law, rule, regulation, policy, or practice is not enforceable. Two are especially relevant: it is unenforceable if it "conflicts with part 115," or if it regulates the "location or development" of a materials management facility and "is not part of or not consistent with" the county MMP.
The Legislature thus treated actual conflict and absence from or inconsistency with the MMP as separate defects. That wording is difficult to square with the categorical proposition that any local provision beyond a state minimum automatically conflicts. If every additional condition were necessarily a conflict, the distinct MMP-consistency route in subsection (b) would do little work.
MCL 324.11583 is not, standing alone, an affirmative grant of unlimited regulatory power. But it is important evidence of how the statutory system is meant to operate: inclusion in the MMP removes one express ground of unenforceability, while subsection (a) continues to invalidate a provision that truly conflicts with Part 115.
Michigan's modern conflict-preemption decisions support the same distinction. A direct conflict generally exists when local law prohibits what state law permits or permits what state law prohibits. In DeRuiter v Township of Byron, 505 Mich 130 (2020), the Michigan Supreme Court rejected the argument that every additional local condition contradicted a state regulatory statute. The Court explained that local law may "add to the conditions" without prohibiting the activity state law permits, and held that the challenged zoning restriction added to and complemented the state act. See also Michigan Gun Owners, Inc v Ann Arbor Public Schools, 502 Mich 695 (2018) (discussing the distinction between conflict preemption and field preemption).
Those decisions do not decide county authority under Part 115; the source and scope of delegated authority still must be shown. Here, however, the delegation is not inferred from silence alone. Part 115 affirmatively requires local plan writers to create minimum criteria, makes those criteria part of the state-law consistency test, and directs EGLE to apply that test. In that setting, a criterion should not be deemed conflicting merely because it demands more than a statewide floor. The proper questions are whether the criterion is within the siting/development function, whether simultaneous compliance is possible, and whether the state statute affirmatively guarantees the applicant the very thing the criterion forbids.
MCL 324.11585 repeatedly refers to a "specific facility" or "type of facility." Subsection (2) allows an MMP to identify a specific facility or facility type as automatically consistent. Subsection (3)(a) asks whether the MMP authorizes "that type" of facility to be sited. The statute therefore does not require one uniform set of criteria for every kind of materials management facility.
EGLE's January 2026 guide makes the point explicit: "The siting process and criteria may differ by facility type and/or county, if applicable." It also advises that the criteria should be objective and measurable. The guidance is not a judicial construction and does not answer how far a particular performance criterion may go. It is nevertheless the administering agency's published description of a decentralized system in which criteria vary rather than a single statewide checklist.
The planning committee's duty to identify relevant local materials-management policies and priorities would be oddly constrained if it could respond only to generic map features. Local conditions can include population density, nearby sensitive receptors, hydrogeology, emergency-response resources, cumulative facility burden, documented incidents, and the characteristics of a proposed facility type. The resulting criterion still must address the proposed siting or development and remain compatible with state law, but the factual predicate may be county specific.
The Arbor Hills history does not itself establish the scope of MCL 324.11579, but it provides significant risk context. A proposed expansion at a landfill with a documented history of elevated-temperature conditions, regulatory higher-operating-value approvals, nearby receptors, or unusual waste streams presents a different local development question from a greenfield materials-recovery facility elsewhere. Requiring an applicant to address that documented risk in the proposed design and permit package is a rational use of objective, facility-specific criteria -- provided the criterion remains compatible with Part 115 and leaves technical administration to EGLE.
Part 115 repeatedly distinguishes among landfills, municipal solid-waste incinerators, materials-utilization facilities, and particular subtypes. Those distinctions provide some of the strongest evidence that MMP criteria may be tailored by facility type.
MCL 324.11579(3) prohibits siting criteria that are more restrictive than state law if a materials-utilization facility could not be developed anywhere in the planning area under those criteria. "Materials-utilization facility" is a defined category that includes materials-recovery facilities, composting facilities, anaerobic digesters, and innovative-technology facilities. A landfill is a disposal area, not a materials-utilization facility.
The broader defined term "materials management facility" includes disposal areas, materials-utilization facilities, and waste-diversion centers. The Legislature used that broader term throughout MCL 324.11585 when it intended to reach the full universe. Its choice of the narrower "materials-utilization facility" in MCL 324.11579(3) is therefore presumptively meaningful.
The same pattern appears in MCL 324.11555(5): a local unit may impose compost-facility location requirements more restrictive than the statutory setbacks, but not requirements so restrictive that a qualifying facility cannot be established. The Legislature did not write a parallel landfill anti-exclusion clause.
This does not mean a county may use landfill criteria as a disguised absolute ban. Other legal limits remain, including Part 115's scope, conflict preemption, constitutional constraints, reasonableness, and EGLE's plan-approval review. But a court should not extend a carefully drafted MUF or composting protection to landfills by implication when the Legislature used defined terms and knew how to cover all materials management facilities.
Equally important, MCL 324.11579(3) would be largely unnecessary if "more restrictive than state law" always meant "conflicting with state law." The subsection assumes that more-restrictive criteria can exist and prohibits only a defined subset: those that make development of a MUF impossible anywhere in the planning area. Giving that limitation independent work supports the proposition that compatible, more-protective criteria are not categorically forbidden.
MCL 324.11579(2) says a materials-utilization facility need not be sited if the CAA or DPA demonstrates sufficient available capacity to address the managed materials identified by the MMP.
MCL 324.11585(6), by contrast, says a landfill other than a captive Type III landfill -- or a municipal solid-waste incinerator -- need not be sited if the CAA demonstrates through the MMP that the planning area has at least 66 months of available solid-waste disposal capacity.
The Legislature did not use one generic capacity rule. It selected a precise 66-month measure for landfill and incinerator disposal capacity and a different, materials-based sufficiency test for MUFs. The distinction confirms that the siting system is facility-category specific. It also undercuts an argument that the county must apply one undifferentiated set of criteria to every facility type.
If the local planning process fails and EGLE prepares the MMP, MCL 324.11580(2) says the state-prepared plan "need not contain" a requirement that a proposed facility meet additional siting criteria or obtain host-community approval under MCL 324.11585(3)(c). This provision does not itself define the permissible content of minimum criteria. It does, however, show that the Legislature expected locally produced plans to contain discretionary, locally chosen layers that a state-prepared substitute plan may omit.
That choice makes sense only if local plan preparation has substantive significance. The MMP is not merely a county clerk's reproduction of statewide licensing rules.
Under MCL 324.11585(3), a nonautomatic facility must meet the MMP's minimum criteria in all events. It must then either obtain host-community approval or meet the plan's supplemental criteria for facilities lacking such approval.
The distinction is important for drafting. A protection intended to apply to every proposed landfill or expansion belongs in the minimum criteria, not solely in the supplemental criteria. Otherwise, host approval could substitute for that protection. The Legislature's separate treatment of the two sets also shows that "minimum criteria" should not be read as an empty procedural label.
The principal counterargument is serious. Part 115 extensively regulates landfill engineering, construction, licensing, monitoring, inspections, corrective action, and enforcement. Older Michigan cases recognized the pervasiveness of the state solid-waste scheme and, in some contexts, preempted local attempts to regulate landfill operations. See, e.g., Southeastern Oakland County Incinerator Authority v Avon Township, 144 Mich App 39 (1985).
At the same time, County of Saginaw v John Sexton Corp of Michigan, 232 Mich App 202 (1998), rejected total field preemption of a county landfill surcharge. Applying the predecessor statute, the court observed that supplementary regulation adapted to local conditions may survive when it does not interfere with the state scheme. The decision also recognized that landfill locations and features differ and that local regulatory needs may vary. Its discussion of the predecessor provisions is instructive, but it did not construe the new MMP sections enacted in 2022.
These authorities suggest a drafting line:
Legally stronger formulation
Before a new Type II landfill or a horizontal or vertical expansion is determined consistent with the MMP, the applicant must demonstrate that the proposed development and its application to EGLE include [specified objective monitoring infrastructure, professionally prepared response plans, performance commitments, and reporting capabilities]. Those elements must be incorporated into the facility's EGLE-approved engineering plans, construction permit, operating license, or other enforceable state authorization, as applicable.
Legally weaker formulation
The county shall continuously inspect landfill operations, decide when technical corrective action is required, prescribe the operator's response, issue operational violations, and impose penalties independent of EGLE.
The first formulation uses the MMP for the role the statute expressly gives it: deciding whether a proposed development is eligible for a consistency finding. It makes EGLE's existing permit process the vehicle for technical review and enforcement. The second creates a parallel local environmental regulatory program and therefore invites the strongest field-preemption and delegated-authority challenges.
Corrective-action deadlines require particular care. A criterion may require the applicant to submit an objective, professionally supported response protocol with stated triggers, escalation steps, and outer timeframes as part of the proposed development package. It is more vulnerable if it authorizes a county body to choose technical remedies in real time or to supersede an EGLE-approved plan.
A geography-only interpretation creates several structural problems:
Michigan courts ordinarily read a statute as a whole, give effect to every word and clause, and avoid making provisions surplusage. They also start with the text rather than inserting an unstated limitation. Applied here, those principles favor a bounded but substantive reading of "minimum criteria."
"Siting" cannot be read in isolation from "development," "expansion," and the multi-step consistency system. The guide itself describes the siting process as deciding whether a proposed facility or expansion is allowed to be developed. Some criteria will naturally be spatial, but neither the statute nor EGLE's guidance makes the examples exclusive.
EGLE retains technical administration. A criterion can define what an applicant must include in a proposed development without making the county the technical regulator. The legal question is not whether the subject has technical content; setbacks, liners, gas systems, groundwater controls, and emergency infrastructure all do. The better question is who reviews, incorporates, and enforces the requirement. Routing it through EGLE's permit or license preserves the statutory allocation of authority.
That is too broad. Michigan conflict-preemption doctrine does not equate every additional requirement with contradiction, and Part 115 itself expressly contemplates some requirements "more restrictive than state law" before limiting only a particular exclusionary result for MUFs. The more accurate rule is: a nonconflicting additional requirement is not invalid merely because it adds protection, but it must still fall within delegated MMP authority and must not frustrate an affirmative state authorization or occupy a field reserved exclusively to EGLE.
Correct -- but incomplete. The affirmative authority comes from MCL 324.11573, 324.11578, 324.11579, and 324.11585: local priority setting, mandatory plan preparation, required minimum criteria, and consistency determinations. MCL 324.11583 then identifies limits. Reading those provisions together avoids treating a negative preemption clause as the sole source of authority while still giving its distinction between conflict and MMP inconsistency real effect.
EGLE must independently evaluate consistency; it is not bound by the CAA's conclusion. But that does not make county criteria irrelevant or permit EGLE to disregard an approved MMP. MCL 324.11585(3) requires consistency "as determined by the CAA or other entity specified by the MMP and by the department." MCL 324.11585(5) requires the applicant to document consistency, and MCL 324.11508(2) directs EGLE to deny authorization absent an approved plan and a consistent facility. EGLE's independence concerns who decides; it does not erase the criteria to be applied.
They establish a real caution against parallel local operational regulation, not a definitive interpretation of the 2022 MMP text. The present Legislature enacted a detailed local-plan/state-approval/state-consistency system after those cases. The new text must be construed on its own terms. Moreover, County of Saginaw rejected total field preemption in a landfill context and recognized room for compatible local measures adapted to local conditions.
To maximize legal defensibility, minimum criteria should:
An attorney, legislative counsel, or the Attorney General should be asked to address the following precise questions:
The strongest textual account of Part 115 is neither "counties may regulate anything" nor "counties may draw only lines on a map." The statute creates a middle position.
The Legislature required locally prepared MMPs to contain minimum criteria; directed local bodies to identify local policies and priorities; allowed criteria to operate by facility type; made those criteria part of both local and state consistency decisions; required EGLE to independently apply the applicable MMP during permitting and licensing; and preserved EGLE's ultimate regulatory and enforcement role. It also wrote targeted restrictions for MUFs and composting facilities without extending those same restrictions to landfills, and it adopted different capacity rules for the two categories.
Read as a coherent whole, Part 115 permits an MMP to do more than identify permissible geography. It can establish objective, nonconflicting, facility-specific conditions that a proposed landfill or expansion must incorporate to qualify as consistent with the county plan. The safest and most faithful implementation is to write those protections as development-eligibility criteria, supported by a local factual record and carried into EGLE's permit or license -- not as a separate county system for inspecting and policing ongoing landfill operations.