Syracuse City Council Seeks Alternatives to Incineration

- by Tim Knauss, March 2, 2015, Syracuse.com

The city coun­cil today vot­ed against a 20-year exten­sion of Syra­cuse’s garbage dis­pos­al con­tract with the Ononda­ga Coun­ty Resource Recov­ery Agency, cit­ing a desire to pur­sue alter­na­tives to trash incineration.

Syra­cuse remains oblig­at­ed under its exist­ing con­tract to haul waste to OCCRA’s trash plant near Jamesville through June 2015, but it’s not clear what will hap­pen after that.

Coun­cilor-at-Large Jean Kess­ner, who led oppo­si­tion to the con­tract renew­al, said she would like the city to nego­ti­ate a five-year deal with OCRRA and pur­sue alter­na­tives over the long term, such as more exten­sive recycling.

But Ononda­ga Coun­ty passed a so-called flow con­trol law in 2003 that requires munic­i­pal­i­ties to deliv­er garbage to OCRRA. That law could be used to com­pel the city to send its garbage to OCRRA, said Dis­trict Coun­cilor Jake Bar­rett, who also serves on the OCRRA board of directors.

Bar­rett was among the three coun­cilors who vot­ed to approve the con­tract. With­out a con­tract, Syra­cuse might lose a $5‑per-ton dis­count on tip­ping fees that OCRRA gives to pre­ferred waste haulers, he said.

The city coun­cil’s vote comes dur­ing a year of con­tro­ver­sy and tran­si­tion for the 20-year-old trash incin­er­a­tor on Rock Cut Road.

Tues­day, the coun­ty Leg­is­la­ture is sched­uled to vote on an envi­ron­men­tal impact state­ment for a so-called “ash for trash” agree­ment with neigh­bor­ing Cort­land County.

Oppo­nents of the deal are urg­ing leg­is­la­tors to delay the vote and extend the envi­ron­men­tal review. They want the coun­ty exam­ine poten­tial health impacts more close­ly and to con­sid­er alter­na­tives, such as phas­ing out the incinerator.

But the OCRRA plant has been chron­i­cal­ly under-uti­lized, and agency offi­cials want to increase the amount of garbage burned there.

Fol­low­ing a year of dif­fi­cult nego­ti­a­tions, OCRRA in Novem­ber approved a new 20-year con­tract with the oper­a­tor of its trash plant, Cov­an­ta Ener­gy Corp. Among oth­er things, the con­tract oblig­ates OCRRA to increase the amount of garbage com­ing into the plant by 30,000 tons from today’s lev­el, or about 9 percent.

Ononda­ga Coun­ty Exec­u­tive Joanie Mahoney and leg­isla­tive lead­ers have tout­ed the agree­ment with Cort­land Coun­ty as a finan­cial­ly and envi­ron­men­tal­ly ben­e­fi­cial solu­tion to OCR­RA’s short­age of trash.

Under the deal Cort­land Coun­ty would send about 25,000 tons of garbage a year, and would accept ash from the OCRAA incin­er­a­tor at the Cort­land Coun­ty landfill.

Crit­ics, includ­ing Kess­ner, say the com­mu­ni­ty should work to phase out trash incin­er­a­tion, which con­tributes to air pol­lu­tion and glob­al warming.

She wants Syra­cuse, which pro­vides about 13 per­cent of the trash at OCR­RA’s facil­i­ty, to spend the next few years look­ing for alter­na­tives. She did not pro­vide specifics today.

“Being locked into a 20-year con­tract would pre­vent the kinds of inno­va­tion that would make our city more sus­tain­able,” Kess­ner said.

Offi­cials at OCRRA, a pub­lic ben­e­fit cor­po­ra­tion, are still review­ing the Syra­cuse coun­cil’s vote and its poten­tial impact, said Kris­ten Law­ton, speak­ing for OCRRA. “It’s hard to say how this is going to work out,” she said.

Although Ononda­ga Coun­ty has a flow-con­trol law that applies to munic­i­pal­i­ties, OCRRA tra­di­tion­al­ly has relied on vol­un­tary con­tracts with each of the 33 munic­i­pal­i­ties that deliv­er trash to the incinerator.