Catching heat: Harrisburg business owner accused of trying to skirt burning regulations

SALINE COUNTY - A Harrisburg business-owner says he's being singled out by the county for having campfires on his property, though county officials say he's trying to skirt state burning regulations.

Mike Crank owns Crank's Tree Service, which he says he's operated for eight or nine years.

"When I started this business, all I had was a chainsaw," Crank said.

He said he had to borrow a truck to haul off limbs from work sites in the beginning. These days, he has a service truck and quite a bit of wood processing equipment.

What he doesn't have is a good relationship with neighbors of his property on Roby Lane, just outside Harrisburg.

He said he had some terse conversations with neighbors shortly after he acquired the property for himself. It had been in his family for many years prior, he said.

In May, Crank was burning some of the tree limbs that had come from his work on his property. He said until that day, when an Illinois Environmental Protection Agency representative pulled up, he did not know he couldn't burn limbs from job sites on his own property.

IEPA spokeswoman Kim Biggs confirmed that her agency had inspected Crank's property and issued a written warning.

In January, though, things took a stranger turn when a county deputy arrived at Crank's property, where he had a small fire going for a get-together. On Jan. 8, Crank was arrested for an EPA violation, which Biggs said was a violation of the state's open burning law. A few days later, with snow on the ground, friends and their children riding sleds and ATVs, and a small fire burning, Crank was arrested again.

He takes issue with both of those arrests, and says he believes neighbors have been putting pressure on the county to make life difficult for him.

Crank also said he was told by an EPA representative that a small campfire or recreational fire no larger than a 6-foot radius, was certainly within the law. In fact, an informational pamphlet on IEPA's Web site mentions cooking fires or campfires on private property as being permissible.

Crank says that's the type of fire he had, and was surprised that officers arrested him both times.

However, he says because he has had so many run-ins with neighbors, he has video evidence showing that the fires in question were no more than recreational. He said he plans to fight his arrests with this evidence, plus IEPA's own rules on open burning.

County officials say they think Crank is downplaying just how much wood he's been burning, though.

Saline County Chief Deputy Ken Clore said the sheriff's office has reason to believe Crank was burning wood, albeit in a small fire setting, for two weeks straight prior to his first arrest.

Crank says he's not trying to skirt the law, and he's trying to clean his property. He sells some of the wood as firewood for $25 a load if an individual wants to cut it and haul it themselves. That is permissible, according to Biggs, the IEPA spokeswoman.

"If there's going to be disposal away from the site where it came from, it has to be processed into a different form, such as firewood," Biggs said.

Besides selling firewood, Crank said he has a sawmill and will be cutting some of timber as rough-cut lumber as soon as he can install the sawmill.

An IEPA burning permit has no application cost and a 90-day turnaround time, according to IEPA literature.

Crank said his difficulties simply stem from neighbors who don't like him.

"They don't like it that I'm here," he said.