Cite as: 511 U. S. 383 (1994)
Souter, J., dissenting
private interests of their owners, and there is therefore only rarely a reason other than economic protectionism for favoring local businesses over their out-of-town competitors. The local government itself occupies a very different market position, however, being the one entity that enters the market to serve the public interest of local citizens quite apart from private interest in private gain. Reasons other than economic protectionism are accordingly more likely to explain the design and effect of an ordinance that favors a public facility. The facility as constructed might, for example, be one that private economic actors, left to their own devices, would not have built, but which the locality needs in order to abate (or guarantee against creating) a public nuisance. There is some evidence in this case that this is so, as the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation would have had no reason to insist that Clarkstown build its own transfer station if the private market had furnished adequate processing capacity to meet Clarkstown's needs. An ordinance that favors a municipal facility, in any event, is one that favors the public sector, and if "we continue to recognize that the States occupy a special and specific position in our constitutional system and that the scope of Congress' authority under the Commerce Clause must reflect that position," Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, 469 U. S. 528, 556 (1985), then surely this Court's dormant Commerce Clause jurisprudence must itself see that favoring state-sponsored facilities differs from discriminating among private economic actors, and is much less likely to be protectionist.
3
Having established that Local Law 9 does not serve the competitive class identified in previous local processing cases and that Clarkstown differs correspondingly from other local processors, we must ask whether these differences justify a standard of dormant Commerce Clause review that differs
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