Need for landfill becoming urgent, agency chair says
The head of the Ulster County Resource Recovery Agency board is calling for greater urgency about finding a landfill site in the county.
“Our main emphasis this year is trying to find a site for a landfill,” Chairman Fred Wadnola said at a board meeting Monday. “We need to really move ahead on that.”
The Resource Recovery Agency currently sends trash collected in the county to the Seneca Meadows landfill near Syracuse, but that site is expected to close within five years.
Wadnola said chances now seem slim that Ulster, Greene and Sullivan counties will form a joint regional trash authority to handle solid waste from all three. Lawmakers in the other two counties seem unwilling to sign on, he said.
“We sort of tried to do the regionalization,” he said. “We looked at a site in ... Greene County. I don’t think that regionalization will come to any kind of solution in the near future.”
Wadnola said discussions going forward will be with leaders of Ulster County municipalities. To that end, he said the agency board plans to meet with the Ulster County Association of Town Supervisors and Village Mayors.
The Resource Recovery Agency has drafted a long-term solid waste management plan that states a study of local landfill options should be a priority. That document, however, has not been approved by either the county Legislature or the state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC).
Agency board member Charles Landi, long a proponent of creating a county landfill, does not expect it will be difficult to get support from county lawmakers. He noted that Legislature Chairman David Donaldson, in a recent address to fellow lawmakers, “wholly laid out the need for a landfill and is encouraged to do something before it becomes a crisis.”
Wadnola said his urgency is based on how long it can take to get approval for a landfill and then create it.
“It’s a very lengthy process trying to get DEC approval, trying to sell it to a community,” he said. “... So we really need to move ahead and really put our emphasis on that.”