Chapter 9
New Coalition Offers Hope for United Action
Boroughs Allied for Recycling and Garbage Equity
As the city moves towards implementing the next set of interim contracts, community groups and elected officials around the city are changing their tactics and working together. Last year, they formed an organization called Boroughs Allied for Recycling and Garbage Equity (B.A.R.G.E.) with the purpose of linking their separate efforts under a single, city-wide umbrella. This coalition intends to force the city and state administrations to undertake the kind of comprehensive planning process that is needed if the city is ever going to achieve a fairer, safer, cleaner and cheaper system of recycling and waste management.
B.A.R.G.E would prefer to focus on long-term visions and planning, but the city administration has forced them to take more short-term action first. B.A.R.G.E. believes it must stop the city administration from carrying out its contracts and filed suit against the city late last year. The interim contracts were announced in August, and the long-term contracts (for thirty years) were announced in December.
One obstacle to implementing the interim contracts is the requirement that any change to the city's SWMP must be certified by the state. The city has said it can begin shifting residential waste in Brooklyn to the private waste transfer stations in early November, even though it is highly unlikely the SWMP will be certified by that time, since it only exists in draft format as yet. Will the city violate the law yet again? Will the state continue to look the other way, as they have with Fresh Kills for all these years?
The City Council's committee on Environmental Protection points out that the "phase-down" schedule and the interim contracts aren't even necessary. In a committee hearing held in East Williamsburg on October 27th 1998, committee chair Stan Michels pointed out the main issue is the ultimate closure of the land fill, which can happen with or without a phase down. B.A.R.G.E agrees, and has made closing Fresh Kills by 2002 -- as mandated under state law -- a priority.
B.A.R.G.E.'s immediate concern is that the city administration violated state environmental law when it made the deal to not include sites in Staten Island in their planning. The law requires any modification (such as the interim and long-term contracts) to the Solid Waste Management Plan (SWMP) to consider all viable alternatives.
Specifically, the Mayor's secret plans left the existing barge-to-rail facility at Howland Hook in Staten Island out of the discussion. Yet many experts in waste management say that Howland Hook, or other barge-to-rail facilities, will be one the most workable ways to transport the city's garbage out of the city over the coming decades.
Thomas Outerbridge, a Staten Island advocate and member of the Citywide Recycling Advisory Board, suggests that barges now going to Fresh Kills could be re-fitted to carry closed containers of garbage to Howland Hook, where they would be transferred to rail cars and taken by train to landfills and waste-to-energy incinerators outside the city (where it's ultimately going to go anyway). The containers would eliminate waste transfer stations' open piles of garbage and save Staten Islanders from suffering more odors, dust, and water pollution. The barge-to-rail alternative would allow the city to continue using its equitably distributed municipal marine transfer stations and save neighborhoods from massive increases in truck traffic.
Chapter 10 -- The Prospects for Community Planning in Waste Management
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