Supervisors re-endorse landfill expansion

Solid waste research task force formed

By FRITZ MAYER

MONTICELLO, NY — The overwhelming majority of town supervisors in Sullivan County want to see the expansion of the landfill proceed. That was the message Lumberland supervisor John LiGreci, who is also chairman of the Sullivan County Supervisors Association, brought to county lawmakers at the government center on February 14.

Of the 15 town supervisors in the county, only Tony Cellini, the supervisor of the Town of Thompson, is opposed to the planned expansion of the landfill; the landfill is located within Thompson.

The message came as it becomes increasingly likely that the landfill will be forced to shut down for some amount of time between the period when current cells at the facility are filled and when new cells can be constructed and brought on line. Moreover, there is still no end in sight to the legal challenge being mounted against the expansion by the residents of Mountain Lodge Estates.

At a meeting of the Public Works Committee at which LiGreci made his remarks, county manager David Fanslau also told lawmakers that he was in the process of establishing a solid waste research task force to study the county’s options for dealing with garbage generated within the county.

Also at the meeting, Glenn Pontier and Helen Budrock of Sullivan Renaissance asked lawmakers to donate space at the landfill to allow the community development and esthetics program to continue their initiative of demolishing abandoned buildings and of cleaning up illegal roadside dumps. Pontier said the group had demolished nine buildings in the county in 2007 and cleaned up two dumps. Lawmaker Leni Binder called the program one of the most important in the county, and she and her colleagues voted to allow the organization to deposit up to 270 tons of solid waste into the landfill without charge; the tipping fees would normally be about $34,000.

All of this comes at a time when there is renewed lobbying activity on both sides of the landfill issue because of uncertainties about whether the county will gain the necessary permits to proceed with the expansion, and because of questions about whether it might be less expensive to have solid waste shipped out of the county, rather than going forward with the expansion.

County chairman Jonathan Rouis pointed to the Renaissance program to show that there are upsides to having a landfill in the county.

At the monthly meeting on January 24, however, Effy Steigman, a summer resident at Mountain Lodge Estates, which is located just across the road from where the expansion would be located, said, “The expansion is an eviction notice for us… We will continue to fight this with everything we’ve got.”