Issues piling up for trash agency
Nightmarish complications piled up on the state’s quasipublic trash agency in recent days as it faced an end-of-the-world scenario — the world, at least, as the often-controversial Materials Innovation and Recycling Authority (MIRA) has known it for about half a century.
Since the 1980s, MIRA has been burning municipal trash around the clock to generate electricity at its massive plant on Maxim Road in Hartford’s South Meadows, but economic and political factors are forcing the shutdown of the venerable wasteto-energy plant on or about June 30, 2022, as now scheduled.
And, to make things worse, MIRA’s governing board was told last week by a state environmental official that it may be blocked from pursuing its alternative plan — which is to turn the Hartford plant into a big transfer station from which its 48 customer towns’ garbage would be trucked out to landfills, including big ones in rural Ohio and western New York.
Robert Isner, manager of solid and hazardous waste for the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP), told the MIRA board at a Wednesday meeting that before MIRA can proceed with that plan, it would likely have to go through an application process for either an entirely new DEEP permit, or for the modification of its existing one.
Under either option, Isner said, “there is a reasonable to high likelihood of a request for a hearing, adding substantial time to the process.”
That means the application process wouldn’t take months, but maybe years — and MIRA doesn’t have years. It has 13 ½ months before the trash-toenergy plant shuts down. And it’s contractually obligated to dispose of the customer towns’ garbage until mid-2027.
‘It is going to die’
One MIRA board member, Scott Shanley, the general manager for the town of Manchester, assessed the situation in dire terms, saying that based on the discussion it seems it will be “years before we can get a permit to do anything at the site, if ever.”
“The challenge, of course, is that this thing is falling apart, and it is going to die — and the question is what happens when it dies,” Shanley said. “So now we’re in extremis, and I feel like from this conversation, we’re pretty much being told to go through the normal process [but] that normal process isn’t going to work for us.”
And that “leads to a discussion that we’ve had before,” Shanley said, “and that is maybe it’s time for MIRA to decide that there’s no space for MIRA as an operation to
a paper like this in this community,” Bronin said. “I fear what happens if the ownership changes to a hedge fund whose business model is based not on truth but extraction.”
Alden, currently the largest shareholder with a nearly 32% stake in Tribune, has purchased at least 200 newspapers and aggressively cut costs, eliminating jobs. According to the Washington Post, the hedge fund mismanaged employees pension funds, prompting a Labor Department investigation.
A spokesperson for Alden could not be reached Saturday. Tribune Publishing and the Courant declined to comment.
Blumenthal spoke of looking at the Courant with trepidation in the morning occasionally but he said that the paper, which was founded in 1764 and is the oldest continuously published newspaper in the U.S., is vital to the communities it serves.
“I say to the shareholders of Tribune: Get a better buyer. One who respects community, not just dollar signs. One who regards the Courant as the priceless asset it is, not just real estate that they can put on the auction block,’’ Blumenthal said.
A letter sent Friday by the state treasurers of Maryland, Illinois and Connecticut to the Tribune board of directors warned that much is at stake with the sale of the newspapers.
“We know all too well that reduced local news coverage leads to lower voter turnout, increased political partisanship, and less sunlight on the financial decisions made by elected leaders,’’ said the letter, which was signed by state Treasurer Shawn T. Wooden and his colleagues in Maryland and Illinois.
Layoffs and buyouts have reduced the Courant’s staff over the years and the paper’s newsroom was closed in December, forcing reporters, photographers and editors to continue to work from home as they have done since the start of the pandemic last March. Printing the paper has also been outsourced.
Saturday’s rally, organized by the Hartford Courant Guild, was held in a parking lot next to the former Courant offices and newsroom on Broad Street. Other rallies were held at Tribune papers around the country, including the Chicago Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel and the Virginian-Pilot. Tribune Publishing also includes the Baltimore Sun and the New York Daily News.
“You’ve already been cut to the bone,” AFL-CIO president Sal Luciano told a crowd of more than 100. “Twenty years ago, the Courant had a news staff of nearly 400 people.
“All a hedge fund will do is wring the last few dollars out . ... We can’t let that happen.”
Courant reporter Christine Dempsey held up a copy of the newsroom directory from 1993, which had multiple pages, and compared it to the much smaller newsroom now.
“The general public is not aware of how few people are actually putting the paper out,” Courant reporter Christopher Keating said. “The people who are still here after all these years are really doing yeoman’s work on every topic — sports, photographers, news, politics, everything we write about, everybody is going the extra mile. If you’re still here at the Hartford Courant in 2021, you’re playing for pride.”