Re:Carpetbaggers shall descend: (Score 1)

Sure, but this argument assumes that most communities are single monolithic voting blocks, which they aren't. Historically, the US has a huge and well-documented correlation between the location of hazardous waste dumps and the locations of low-income minority populations. This could be because people who site hazardous waste dumps tend to pick the least desirable property available (the ghetto), or because placing a hazardous waste dump tends to torpedo property values (thus creating a ghetto). Either way, there's a massive correspondence between the location of hazardous dumps and the numbers of dark-skinned people living in poverty around the dump. The issue here is that poor minorities are already under-represented in politics -- that's almost tautological. In other words, the people most likely to be directly affected by a dump are the ones least likely to have any input into the decision process, and they'll be the ones with the least legal recourse if something goes wrong. Unless this whole 'volunteer' project is far more careful to protect minorities than any other US government project I'm aware of, you'll have rich powerful people volunteering their town as a storage site, then having the storage site placed in with the poor and powerless people who didn't vote for it.