Lansford Borough Council members say that they cannot provide a dumping place for the proposed demolition of the former Palace Theater.

It's unclear how the decision will affect a developer's plans to build a medical facility on the site of the bygone movie house located in the borough at Patterson and Bertsch streets.At its meeting Wednesday, Borough council voted 6-0 to notify developer Joseph Bennett that the borough doesn't have the authority to provide a dump site for "clean fill" from the demolition project."The property is not ours. (He can) speak to the owner to see if they have any problem dumping there, or they have another site. But I don't think we should be involved with the dumping process on that land," board member Rose Mary Cannon said.When Bennett proposed the idea of a medical building on the site of the Palace earlier this year, the dumping ground was a key provision.Bennett proposed the idea of using land on the east side of the borough, not far from the Panther Valley High School.The borough had used the site for clean fill before, and they owned property there. When asked, Bennett said the dump site was critical to making the project happen, so council approved it.But shortly after the vote, there were rumblings among some borough residents that the land picked for the dumping did not actually belong to the borough. Former Councilman Tommy Vadyak said the clean fill dump site was actually owned by a coal company that allowed the borough to use it.Cannon said she researched the deed for the property and found that the borough owns 27 acres. But an engineer looked at the deed and determined that the borough's property actually wraps around the site, and meets the property of Panther Valley High School.Councilman Matt Walsh asked if there was any way the site could be used.Cannon said the site isn't just difficult to access, it was the town's former dump. Doing any work on it could open the cash-strapped borough to a host of expenses."I don't believe that's a piece of land that could be used right now. It was closed by DEP," Cannon said.