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Riverside Trash Centers Could be Dumped After Decade-Long Fight

By DNAinfo Staff on April 13, 2011 8:49am

By Jill Colvin

DNAinfo Reporter/Producer

CITY HALL — For nearly 20 years, Morningside Heights resident Marie Ledoux fought to introduce something few would want in their own backyards: garbage.

Standing up against heated opposition, she and other members of the Morningside Heights-West Harlem Sanitation Coalition rallied, testified and organized with hundreds of other residents to convince the Bloomberg administration that Manhattan wasn't pulling its weight when it came to trash.

"We all produce garbage and we should all share in the responsibility of getting rid of it," said Ledoux, 82, who was shocked when she first learned that the borough doesn't process any of its own trash.

She and others celebrated when Mayor Michael Bloomberg embraced their cause in his 2006 Solid Waste Management Plan (SWMP), which called for the construction of four new solid waste "marine transfer facilities," which rely on barges instead of long-haul trucks.

Three of the four are slated for Manhattan: an East 91st Street marine transfer station, a West 59th Street commercial waste transfer station and the controversial Gansevoort recycling center on the Hudson River, between Gansevoort and Little West 12th streets.

But now Ledoux and other advocates fear their years of hard work are being tossed to the curb.

The mayor's preliminary capital budget plan, released in February, defers funding for the facilities' construction for five to eight years. While the plans have not been canceled outright, advocates say the distinction is essentially meaningless because the current administration will be out of office by that time.

"The practical consequence is that it just eliminates the facilities," said Gavin Kearney, the director of the environmental justice program at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, which opposes the cuts.

"We'll be back to square one," he said.

Jason Post, a spokesman for the mayor, said because of the bad economy, the city has been forced to reduce its expenditures across the board, including the sanitation capital plan.

But he said the city is still considering alternatives to speed up the time frame before a final budget deal is announced.

In the mean time, advocates are upping the pressure, urging the mayor to reconsider.

At a press conference at City Hall Tuesday, Brooklyn City Councilman Stephen Levin joined advocates and other elected officials in blasting the scale-back as "absolutely outrageous" and "morally wrong."

"We're deeply troubled," said Eddie Bautista of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance. "This is a five-borough problem and it requires a five-borough plan."

Advocates also blasted the administration for giving up on a project that it had once seemed to embrace.

"He said we have to give the people some relief. He sounded so sincere," Ledoux said.

For many, the issue is one of fairness. They say residents of Williamsburg and Greenpoint, Brooklyn and the South Bronx should not be burdened with so much of the city's waste, which some suggested might contribute to heightened asthma rates.

Others argue that building marine-based facilities across the city will benefit everyone because they will cut down on the number of diesel-fueled garbage trucks spewing fumes and clogging streets as they travel hundreds of miles shipping garbage to the boroughs and New Jersey each day.

Meanwhile, despite the potential delays, Post said the administration "remains fully committed to SWMP's principles of borough equity, using rail and barge to transfer solid waste, relieving the burden of waste receiving from certain communities, strengthening our recycling infrastructure and piloting new technologies to derive clean energy from waste."