Town of Rhinebeck asked to contribute toward composting

Town Board members are holding off on a village request for $12,500 toward the cost of a full-time composting facility.

The funding would round out the financial requirements for creating a facility at the village Highway Department garage on state Route 308, Village Board Trustee Vanessa Bertozzi said during a meeting Monday.

“We ran a pilot program, which was a success,” she said. “We ended up using that to make a case and apply for some grants,”

Bertozzi said the grants included $200,000 from the state Department of Environmental Conservation and $100,000 from Partners for Climate Action Hudson Valley.

“We have already received approval for registration with the DEC for our planned compost site and we are currently going to the town Planning Board for site approval,” she said.

Bertozzi suggested the village and town agree on a three-year memorandum of understanding to split the cost.

Supervisor Elizabeth Spinzia said splitting the cost evenly could be a larger burden on the town than the village.

“I would want to see how many town residents use this and see if it’s equitable,” she said. “If the hospital is going to be doing it and you have restaurants signing up and the schools is going to be doing it, those are all village properties.”

Bertozzi said the pilot program that began a year ago has individuals pay to dispose of food scraps that are currently taken to the Ulster County Resource Recovery Agency facility in the town of Ulster. The program attracted about 100 households and eight businesses.

“We were doing about two tons a month in terms of food scraps,” she said.

“Because it was done over at UCRRA, we don’t know how much came out.”

Village officials plan to have the composting facility covering a 14-by-60-foot area, which is expected to accept about a ton of food scapes per week, Bertozzi said after the meeting. She said the amount of compost material produced would depend on the type of material used in the decomposition process.

“It will be on an unused concrete pad and will have a pavilion-style shed roof on it,” she said.