After nearly two decades of pollution problems and financial woes, a tire incinerator in one of Illinois’ poorest communities will close permanently as part of a legal settlement announced Monday by federal authorities.

Still unresolved is a federal civil rights investigation into why former Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s administration awarded a permit in 2005 to restart the controversial tire burner in Ford Heights, a south suburb where 95 percent of the population is black and per capita income is among the lowest in the state.

Despite chronic pollution violations by the plant’s former owners and widespread concerns about incineration’s health effects, the Blagojevich administration gave a new group of investors a chance to make the tire burner work. They pitched incineration as a way to generate electricity and keep tires out of landfills.

But the new owner, Geneva Energy, soon faced the same troubles that forced its predecessors out of business. By 2010, state inspectors had cited the company’s plant four times for exceeding pollution limits and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had stepped in with a legal complaint.

The current owners haven’t operated the incinerator since August 2011, according to court documents. They agreed to close it permanently under an agreement with the EPA.

“This settlement will eliminate the source of almost 200 tons of air pollutants each year in a community that has historically been disproportionately impacted by environmental contamination,” Susan Hedman, the EPA’s regional administrator, said in a statement.

The federal government considers incineration one of the least desirable ways to dispose of the nearly 300 million scrap tires Americans produce each year. Once piled into landfills, tires increasingly are being shredded and recycled in asphalt, playground cushioning, athletic tracks and other products.

Closing the Ford Heights plant leaves an incinerator in Sterling, Conn., as the only dedicated tire burner still operating in the United States, according to the EPA.

Throughout its troubled history, the Ford Heights plant had political patrons in Springfield pushing laws to make it financially viable.

The facility was built in 1995 amid growing debate about a state law that required power companies to buy electricity from incinerators at above-market rates. Lawmakers repealed the subsidies a year later, the original owners of the incinerator went bankrupt and the company defaulted on nearly $80 million in state bonds.

Another group of investors flourished during a Bridgestone/Firestone tire recall in 2000 but filed for bankruptcy after the incinerator’s turbine blew up in 2004.

In 2010, the same year the EPA’s Office of Civil Rights began its investigation, the Illinois House passed a bill that would have added tire burning to the state’s definition of green, renewable energy. The measure would have made the incinerator a player in a growing market for renewable energy in Illinois, where power companies must get at least 10 percent of their electricity from pollution-free sources by 2015 and 25 percent by 2025.

At the time, the incinerator’s owner told the Tribune that green energy subsidies would be “the difference between us making it or not.” The measure later failed in the Illinois Senate.

On Monday, a lawyer for the company said she was not authorized to comment on the settlement. According to court documents, Geneva Energy is unable to pay a fine. NAES Corp., which operated the tire burner for Geneva Energy in 2008 and 2009, will pay the government $185,000 to resolve a related complaint.

Any new owners would need EPA approval to operate the incinerator. Geneva Energy surrendered its permits as part of the settlement.

“This thing has been a mess since the beginning,” said Keith Kemp, a resident of nearby Chicago Heights who fought the incinerator for years. “We still want to know why they allowed it to happen in the first place.”