Special Meeting To Vote On Landfill Agreements
by Alex Brooks
On the agenda at Petersburgh’s February 26 special meeting of the Town Board was setting a date for a final vote on the three agreements negotiated by the Town’s environmental attorney Kevin Young. The first is a consent agreement with the Town agreeing to close the landfill properly, including installation of a leachate collection system. The second is an agreement with Covanta in which Covanta agrees to grant the Town $200,000 without admitting liability in order to avoid litigation over the failure of its predecessor company, Energy Answers, to properly close the landfill under a 1991 contract. The third is an agreement with Taconic to provide $300,000 to the towns to help with the cost of landfill closure. This agreement, which was originally presented at the February 17 meeting as a $250,000 grant but is now $300,000, contains an agreement between the towns and Taconic not to sue each other about matters pertaining to the landfill, but does not release Taconic from liability concerning larger questions of contamination of the aquifer and so on.
The vote was initially set for a special meeting on March 2, and an informational meeting about the landfill for March 15, but after the public was heard from those dates were changed, because members of the public felt that the informational meeting informing the public should happen before the Town Board takes a final vote on the matter. The Town Board accepted this idea and set the informational meeting for Sunday evening March 8 and the special meeting to vote on the three agreements for Monday March 9 at 7 pm.
Members of the public also asked questions and expressed various opinions about the landfill situation which expressed a great deal of confusion about exactly what the Town is facing and what the options are. The Eastwick Press sought an interview with the Town’s environmental attorney Kevin Young asking him to state as clearly as possible the options facing the towns of Berlin and Petersburgh.
Young outlined the process he expects to see if the Town accepts the agreements that he has negotiated. He said the first step would be to evaluate the landfill and create detailed plans for keeping water out of the landfill and for collecting the leachate which seeps out of the bottom of the landfill. He estimates the cost of doing this study to be “in the tens of thousands.” The next step would be to implement the water diversion plans designed to minimize the amount of water getting into the landfill. Young estimates the cost of this task also to be “in the tens of thousands.” The next thing would be to design the leachate collection system and the leachate treatment system. He said a rough estimate of the cost to build this system is $200,000.
Once a leachate collection system has been designed, the Towns will work with DEC on developing an affordable plan to treat the leachate on site, or to truck it to a facility where it can be treated. Young said it is too early to estimate what the ongoing cost would be of handling the leachate collected, because we don’t know what quantity of leachate would need to be handled, or exactly what DEC would require concerning its treatment and disposal. He expects it could be a significant but manageable annual cost, which would be subsidized for a number of years by whatever is left of the Covanta/Taconic money, or perhaps by some new agreement with Taconic about ongoing operation and maintenance costs. If the Towns and DEC cannot agree on an affordable and feasible plan for the management of the leachate, the Towns could terminate the consent order. If they do that, DEC would decide how best to proceed (most likely by listing the site on Registry of Inactive Hazardous Waste Sites).
Under the consent order alternative, all of the towns’ cost for properly completing the landfill closure would be covered by a grant program in which the State pays 90% of the cost and the local municipality pays 10% of the cost. But Young noted that the landfill closure fund which would pay 90% of the cost has been starved for funds in recent years. The money for this fund comes from the State Environmental Protection Fund which gets $300 million annually from the mortgage recording tax. But in recent years the legislature has only been allocating $250,000 each year for the landfill closure fund. Petersburgh/Berlin’s application has been accepted into this program and the towns were advised that they are currently 11th on the list of Towns seeking funding under the program. It is possible that political pressure might be brought to bear in the next year or two which would cause the legislature to increase the allocation to the landfill closure fund, but even if that doesn’t happen, the State can commit to paying its 90% share when the funds become available – when Peterburgh/Berlin’s application gets to the top of the list – and Young expects that will happen even if the landfill closure fund continues to be underfunded.
If the Town rejects the three agreements and refuses to sign the consent agreement, then the site will be put on the State Superfund list, and then there would be a very different scenario. In that case, the process is under a different set of laws which are much less favorable to the towns. The Superfund law requires a much broader scope of investigation and remediation and includes very strict liability and a strong expectation of holding the owner and operator of the site responsible regardless of who might be at fault. The State takes control of the process and the towns no longer have any control over the scope of the investigation and remediation. Young said he has never seen an investigation of this kind cost less than a million dollars, and the cleanup and remediation is usually quite a bit more than the investigation. So it is very likely that the overall cost will go well into the millions, and the towns will be assessed a portion of that cost. What portion of the cost might be assigned to the towns or to Taconic or to others would be decided by the courts, and major legal battles and very high legal costs are normally a part of this process.
In this scenario the towns do not receive a half million dollars from Taconic and Covanta and are no longer eligible to get 90% of the landfill closure costs paid by the State program, so all of the costs paid by the towns come from the local taxpayers.
An informational meeting about the landfill situation is scheduled for Sunday evening March 8 from 6 to 8 pm at the Petersburgh Baptist Church, and a special Town board meeting is scheduled for Monday March 9 at 7 pm at the PVMCC, at which the Town Board will vote on whether or not to accept the three agreements.