PROVIDENCE - Providence historian and lawyer Patrick Conley wants the state Department of Transportation to make Sims Metal Management , whose scrap metal recycling facility is next door to his business on the waterfront, hide its scrap pile.
In a complaint to the DOT, Conley's lawyer, Michael A. Kelly, demands that the agency enforce a series of state laws and regulations putting the DOT in charge of regulating scrap yards close to interstate highways.
Kelly says that the DOT is required to regulate junkyards that are "public nuisances" and that the law requires that junkyards near interstate highways be screened so that their operation is not visible from the "main traveled way of the interstate."
Neither the DOT nor Sims made an immediate comment.