Chapter 6
Fresh Kills to Close at Last
SICCA Wins, Sort Of
In 1994, conservative Republican George Pataki won a narrow upset victory over Mario Cuomo in the race for Governor. Pataki had greatly benefited from large turnouts in heavily Republican Staten Island, much as Republican Rudolph Giuliani did in the previous year's mayoral election. For the first time in decades, Republicans held the most important executive position in both the state and the city. This unusual alignment of the political stars shined favorably on the borough, and Molinari -- also a Republican -- was not about to let the opportunity slip away. "You could say there was a political debt to pay," says Molinari's staff attorney Dan Master.
In late May of 1996, after several months of quiet negotiations, this Republican triumvirate held a surprise press conference to announce Fresh Kills would close in 2002. Two days later, a law to close the landfill was passed in the state legislature.
In theory, this long overdue decision gave the city an excellent opportunity to restructure waste management and adapt to the changing expectations the public placed on DOS. As long as the mission of DOS had remained straightforward and simple, it seemed to function quite well. Indeed, as recently as the mid-1980s, DOS was thought by many observers to be one of the best-run city agencies. But the department's mission had gradually evolved over the years as the public's increasing environmental awareness resulted in state, federal and local laws to regulate waste more strictly. In 1989, the department's mission was even more fundamentally altered when the city passed the most ambitious recycling laws in the nation. Today, DOS is more commonly described as incompetent, demoralized, and frustrating to work with.
In practice, DOS has failed to adapt to new demands. Its recycling programs have been disappointments. Ideas for improving recycling are not in short supply among the city's environmental advocates, but DOS has resisted change every step of the way. An unsupportive mayor hasn't helped either: Giuliani cut funds to the recycling budget once he entered office, calling recycling "a fad." (The budget was restored by the City Council last year.)
The decision to close the city's last remaining landfill has not resulted in better planning, efficiency, or greater social equity. Indeed, the closing of Fresh Kills was not a planning decision. Rather, it was a back-room deal that did not involve SICCA, the citizen coalition that had fought for years to shut down the landfill, or any similar group. "It was purely a political decision," says Brooklyn's Boyd. "And like all purely political decisions, it was made without any forethought, without any planning."
Instead of planning informing decisionmaking, decisionmaking was forcing a straitjacket on planning. After deciding the landfill would close, Giuliani appointed a task force of agency heads, staffers, and representatives of industry to work out a plan. Guy Molinari served as chair.
Representatives from the other boroughs and environmentalists had been left out of the back-room dealmaking, and they were excluded again from the Mayor's task force. Environmentalists were livid. How can you create a plan to close the city's landfill without input from the very people who have been working to improve waste management and recycling, they asked? After several months of aggressive lobbying, the mayor finally appointed two environmentalists to the task force: SICCA's Warren and Jim Tripp of the Environmental Defense Fund. Even then, Warren and Tripp were kept out of the decisionmaking loop. As Warren describes it, the rest of the task force would meet officially with them, asking them questions as though they were merely giving testimony, then adjourn the meeting and go off to discuss things by themselves. Warren tried to protest, but says she didn't get much support, not even from Tripp.
(NOTE: In mid-November of 1998, Tripp publicly admitted he had made a mistake and that his original approach had been "wrongheaded." He's now circulating an EDF proposal that seeks to force the city to undertake an honest and open comprehensive planning process that involves stakeholders from throughout the city.)
Giuliani also called on the boroughs to prepare their own plans for adapting to the absence of Fresh Kills. The apparent reasoning was that the task force would sketch out a guideline and the boroughs would fill in the blanks.
By the spring of 1997, the task force had released its report and the City Council was holding hearings to prepare its own response. The task force report was predictably short on details. It called for continued use of the city's marine transfer stations: barges would still carry the garbage, just somewhere other than Fresh Kills.
There was also a suggested timeline of annual targets, diverting waste from Fresh Kills to phase it down gradually. Warren had managed to exact this concession in the final days before the report was released. "They were all ready to publish the report when I said, 'wait, you've set the date for closing the landfill, but you haven't said anything about how we're going to get there'" she explained. The annual targets were the result.
This timeline would come to haunt the city's other environmental advocates when DOS treated the targets as law and initiated interim plans to shift garbage from Fresh Kills-bound barges to land-based commercial waste transfer stations. More trash was now on its way to the already saturated neighborhoods of the South Bronx, Greenpoint-Williamsburg, and Red Hook.
In summer the borough reports were completed, and the City Council released its report in October. They all featured a number of suggestions for improving recycling and waste prevention -- ideas DOS had either resisted or ignored since beginning recycling a decade ago. The City Council went a step further, demanding a moratorium on the siting of new transfer stations until acceptable siting regulations were approved.
But all of these reports are more notable for what they omit than what they include. None of them proposes any substantively new plan for phasing out the city's reliance on Fresh Kills. None envisions any realignment of operations or authority around the new mission of maximizing waste prevention, recycling, and composting. None of them offers any specific proposal for de-concentrating the blight of transfer stations so the responsibility would be evenly shared by all parts of the city -- i.e., "fair share" planning.
Yet, asking the ad hoc groups that prepared these reports to single-handedly create a comprehensive plan for changing improving the largest American city's waste management practices is surely too much to ask. Making this kind of massive change to the city's infrastructure can only be achieved through an open process of planning that involves stakeholders from all the city's communities. The city council and borough reports could at best serve as a starting point for this process. Unfortunately, since their release they have only gathered dust.
Chapter 7 -- Contracts for Corporations:
The Mayor Privatizes Trash
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