Guest MINDSETTER™ David Fisher: Woonsocket’s Waste Issues

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Guest MINDSETTER™ David Fisher, Candidate for Mayor

 

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Woonsocket, like most urban areas, has issues with how to dispose of its waste. Right now, two proposals are receiving a lot of attention in the city, and both are creating unnecessary controversy.

First up, our city’s wastewater treatment facility needs to be upgraded. This is not a matter of opinion or financial wherewithal; it is a matter of legal and environmental responsibility.

Many residents of Woonsocket, including current State Rep. and mayoral candidate Lisa Baldelli-Hunt, have declared loudly and often that the city cannot afford to upgrade this facility. The real question is: can we afford not to?

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The estimated cost of a building a new wastewater treatment plant is about $50 million; a hefty bill indeed, but there is no discussion about what it would cost the city to not upgrade the facility.

If the city does not rectify the situation, it is a near certainty that we would be litigated against by the state Department of Environmental Management (DEM), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF), Clean Water Action (CWA), Save the Bay, and a class action suit in which the claimants are every city and town that happen to be downstream from us on the Blackstone.

I recently spoke to Jamie Rhodes, director of the Rhode Island chapter of CWA, about the possibility of these lawsuits being filed against the city if we do not comply with the DEM’s order. He assured me that this is no mere possibility, it is a foregone conclusion. Currently, the Worcester Area Wastewater Treatment Facility is being sued for non-compliance by the DEM and the CLF. Moreover, he said that it is not unusual for municipalities to spend more on fighting orders to comply in court than the cost of upgrades.

Fortunately, the state and federal government have programs and funds available to provide for these upgrades. The state has its own Clean Water Fund, and the EPA provides low-interest loans (2.2 percent APR) for wastewater treatment upgrades. The addition of an anaerobic digester to the design, to process the sludge thereby producing electricity and high-grade fertilizer, would qualify the project for state and federal renewable energy grants, as well.

The second manufactured controversy regarding Woonsocket’s waste stream is centered on the proposal to move the city to a pay-as-you-throw (PAYT) system for billing trash removal in the city. These systems are in place — and working to increase recycling rates — throughout the state.

There is a lot of misinformation floating around regarding this system.

The system is designed to transfer the cost of trash removal to the end user. Residents would be responsible for procuring the city-mandated bags, which would actually reduce the burden on the landlords of the city’s two and three family units, and that is a lot of households. A bit over 70 percent of Woonsocket’s housing stock is multi-family tenements.

The $2 per bag fee is designed to offset the tipping fees at the landfill, not the cost of collection — which is paid through the $96 per year per unit bill that homeowners receive from the city. When you require individuals and families to pay to get rid of their landfillable waste, you can bet that they’ll start being a bit more vigilant about sorting their recyclables, which cost the city to collect, but not to tip at the Central Landfill’s Material Recycling Facility.

Unfortunately, the way that the city treats waste producers depends on the size of the producer, and places an undue burden on single-to-triple family homeowners.

Under existing city ordinances, any commercial producer of waste — including owners of any housing facility with four or more units — cannot participate in the residential waste collection system, and must contract with a private waste hauler to remove their trash.

Waste haulers have no responsibility to also provide for recyclable separation, and frankly, it is not in their best financial interests to do so. Waste haulers who service businesses and large apartment buildings and complexes get paid on a per tip basis; that is to say, every time a trash truck empties a dumpster, they get paid a flat fee. It doesn’t matter if the dumpster has 2 or 200 bags of trash in it, the fee remains the same.

There is, however, a strong financial impetus for the business or large apartment building owner to provide for the separation of recyclables. Most waste haulers charge a lower rate for recyclable collection because they can sell those materials to recyclers after they have been sorted. By removing these recyclable materials from the waste stream, the business or building owner may be able to reduce the size of their dumpster or frequency of pick-up, thereby reducing overhead.

While I think that a PAYT system is a good thing, I think by selling off 10,000 blue bins to Cumberland, the city missed the boat on a key way to improve recycling rates, and garner more money from the Resource Recovery Corporation’s (RRC) profit sharing program.

If we had kept the bins, and offered them to city small businesses and large apartment building owners at a reasonable cost, say $20 per bin, and renegotiated the city’s municipal solid waste contract to collect recyclables from them. This would have done three things.

First, it would provide a low cost way for them to comply with the law.

Second, it would have, as the bins get sold off gradually, have generated $200,000 for the city.

Lastly, it could have vastly increased the amount of recyclables that we send to the landfill, and hence, increased the amount of money that the city gets through the RRC’s profit sharing program. Right now, the city gets about $50,000 per year in profit sharing, but falls well short of the mark for recyclable diversion, and unless we hit the mark, we risk losing those funds, however small.

David Fisher is a candidate for the Mayor of Woonsocket.

 

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