Landfill Expansion
- Building an environmentally responsible landfill that runs at a high level of efficiency is the most cost effective and responsible way for people in Northampton to dispose of their trash.
- Closing the landfill will send our trash to nearby towns; later, when those landfills close, we will have to send our trash even further away, costing residents more and creating a larger carbon footprint.
- We have studied the air and ground water issues and found there to be no risk.
- We have studied the incidence of cancer within one mile of the landfall and found no increased risks.
- Expanding the landfill is the most environmentally responsible thing to do: it means less trucking, keeping trash out of woods and meadows, and less air pollution.
I think expanding the landfill is the right decision for a number of reasons.
I believe that we have the most control over the environmental impacts when we run the landfill. Residents have a place for their trash at an affordable rate instead of shipping it elsewhere at a much higher cost, which increases the likelihood of illegal dumping. We keep the responsibility to monitor the landfill and its effects on the environment for decades after it closes and we have set aside the money to do that in a separate closure fund. And we have control over what goes into the landfill if we as a community commit to emulating our Hilltown neighbors and ratchet up our recycling rates through increased participation and programming. In addition, if we don’t have a landfill, we’re saying to some other communities “We don’t want our trash but we’re willing to have you take it.” That is the question we have to grapple with. Who’s responsible for our trash?
The landfill will have to be closed in mid-2011 if it is not expanded. The expansion of the landfill has been studied extensively. It has not been deemed a danger to the Easthampton water supply, and expansion is a better option than carting off our waste to a landfill in another town in Massachusetts or further away. The landfill takes household and commercial waste from the region. It does not accept industrial waste.
History of the landfill expansion discussion
In the late 1990s, anticipating running out of space in the landfill, a solid waste planning committee under Mayor Mary Ford did a long-range study and recommended expanding the landfill when the time came.
The committee included Marianne LaBarge and other neighbors of the landfill. The Department of Environmental Protection pointed out that the landfill site might be in zone 2 of the recharge area of the Maloney well in Easthampton. That raised a legitimate concern. We told the City of Easthampton what we were exploring and that if we felt no danger was presented,Northampton would apply for a waiver if Easthampton was comfortable with that.
It should be noted that the landfill is on the edge of the Barnes aquifer and is only in the secondary recharge area for a single public drinking water well, the Maloney well, which is currently not in use by Easthampton.
A study was done by Stantec, Geosync and HydroAnalysis in 2004 to model what would happen in the worst possible scenario: if the liner failed, if there was a drought, if nobody knew the liner failed for two days and the leachate was leaking. How much would go to the Maloney well? Less than 1/100th of 1% would get there in a catastrophic failure. All the data was given to Easthampton. They hired SEA (an independent engineering firm) to assess and give comments about our groundwater model. The Easthampton Mayor and City Engineer said they were comfortable with us going ahead with the DEP waiver request. The DEP issued a waiver because they believed that the better environmental choice was to expand the landfill. And, in addition to the ground water modeling, studies were made of cancer incidences within one mile of the landfill and found no risk that warranted further study.
If we don’t expand the landfill there will be three consequences that negatively affect Northampton.
First, as the DEP said when they issued the waiver, if the landfill is not expanded we can expect significantly more trash to land in Northampton’s meadows and woods.
Second, it’s going to cost residents a lot more in trash hauling if our garbage is carted off to another community. This is because the citizens of Northampton, especially those who bring their own trash to the landfill, get a subsidy by having the landfill in our community. We charge less for our citizens to bring their own trash to the landfill than the surrounding communities charge their citizens. If it has to get trucked further away, people are going to have to get a hauler to pick up their trash and take care of it. In terms of additional cost, I think that for private citizens that are bring their trash to the landfill, their costs would at least double and maybe increase by more. For people who already have a hauler picking up their trash, their costs could go up as much as 25 percent, and maybe more.
Third, the DEP was concerned about the carbon footprint of trash being trucked further and further away and the effect that would have on the environment. It is worth noting that landfills in nearby towns, South Hadley, Granby, Chicopee and Barre will be closing between 2010 and 2013 and trash will have to taken much further away, increasing both residents’ costs and the carbon footprint.
The money question
With respect to the issue of revenue, some people suggest that we take other community’s trash in order to keep revenue coming into the city. This isn’t the case. It is difficult now to run the compactor there, to pay the people at the weigh station, and to run the transfer station on 50,000 tons a year which is what we are allowed to accept there. The City of Northampton alone doesn’t generate 50,000 tons a year so it would be almost impossible to run it as just a Northampton landfill. It’s important for people to understand that economically it needs more than just Northampton trash. The infrastructure cost to pay the debt service on the construction of the expansion and the liner, the compactor, and the people who operate the compactor all require a certain amount of money. Fifty thousand tons a year is a small amount of tonnage coming into a landfill and we would not be able to run it at less than that amount.
Another misconception is that we are taking in trash from other communities to subsidize the general fund.
I was the first mayor who took the money out of the general fund. I created an enterprise fund, to say, “Let’s separate out trash revenue from all other revenue so we can make sure that we are balancing the books appropriately on the solid waste.” We created the solid waste enterprise fund, which means that the entire cost of the landfill is contained separately, booked separately and balanced separately. Out of that we pay for all of the costs of operating the landfill; the city is paid $468,000 as a host community fee for having the landfill in our community. Now, if the landfill closed, that amount would be a cut to the city’s budget. But at this point this would be the smallest cut by far when you look at the cuts we’ve taken from the state level, so we aren’t doing it or not doing it for that $468,000. There’s an additional $125,000 or so that covers the pension and benefits of the folks who work for the solid waste enterprise fund. If those people leave those costs go away. There are some fractions of salaries throughout city government for people who do direct work for the landfill that we would have to reallocate. So in the end there would be a hit to the city’s budget of a little more than $670,000. If that happens we’ll deal with it. We are not doing it for the money. Quite frankly if there is no landfill, we will see an increased call on the Board of Health services dealing with dumped trash throughout the city, and an increased push on the DPW for the same reasons.
The downtown Hotel
- The city has discussed the development of the site behind Pulaski Park for many years, and after extensive study and a well-publicized Request for Proposals, the Council chose the hotel proposal, rather than an office building, as being in the best interest of Northampton.
- The original design of the hotel fell far short of community standards, but open meetings and discussions with the Central Business Architecture committee and press coverage of the public discussions, resulted (after several iterations) in a satisfactory design.
- The construction of the Hilton Hotel, which is planned to begin this year, is expected to meet the shortage in downtown hotel rooms and be a boon to the Northampton economy.
- Visitors staying in Northampton bring revenue to the city when they browse and shop in local stores and eat at our restaurants.
The Hilton Hotel that will be built behind Pulaski Park comes from the belief, shared by many, that economic development is good for Northampton because it increases jobs and tax revenue. Since the days of Mayor David Musante, the City has been interested in having a commercial enterprise built on a site behind the park. There was industrial waste there (coal tar), and the city had the gas company (which was responsible for it) clean it up.
The City sent out a Request for Proposals (RFP), agreed to by the entire City Council Finance Committee. There were two responses, one for an office building and the other for a hotel. An analysis looking at what the City would gain from each proposal over a ten-year period concluded that the hotel, which pays both real estate taxes and occupancy tax, was the better deal. The entire City Council voted in favor of proceeding with the hotel project. The award was made subject to a number of conditions, including the hotel building a parking garage to replace the parking spaces lost on the hotel site.
We calculated that the total benefit package to the City for selling this lot will be $1,487,058 over ten years, including at least $1,362,000 in property and occupancy taxes over ten years at a 4% room tax rate. The October 1st increase in the room tax should bring in an additional $160,000 over the ten-year period. The taxes will be guaranteed by a mortgage that will be payable to the City regardless of actual tax receipts.
There had been a study done as part of the Fairgrounds redevelopment project that showed a need for more hotel rooms in the City. We also know that many rooms have been built in Hadley; those people may be staying in Hadley’s motels, but they are driving into Northampton to shop, eat and hear music or other events in the city. A downtown hotel makes sense if we want to reduce the number of car trips in and out of the City. While the hotel may be branded as a Hilton, the owner is local and has a commitment to our community.
This project was the subject of many public meetings and hearings. There were two public hearings held by the Committee on Economic Development, Housing and Land Use to review the RFP before it was released. There were at least four discussions at Council Finance Committee meetings and full Council meetings. There were public meetings with the Central Business Architecture Committee. The approved plan met with some fierce complaints about the design. The developer, who lives in Hadley, worked with an architect to improve the design of the proposed hotel to meet the community's expectations and re-submitted the design to the Central Business Architectural Committee for their approval. The planning board held hours of public meetings and the city’s website was used to provide information to the community. The Planning Board held numerous public hearings about the Special Permit and the Site Plan; these meetings were attended by many, many people. The Board didn’t cut anyone off, allowed people to speak their mind and the press covered the meetings. As a result, there was a substantial amount of community input into the final design of the hotel.
Ford Hall: The Smith College Engineering Building
The City’s relationship with Smith College is a very important one. Smith is the largest property taxpayer in the City (for their non-academic properties), is our second largest employer (after Cooley Dickinson Hospital), and makes very substantial contributions to our public schools and other matters affecting the quality of life enjoyed by our citizens.
Smith College sits on about 125 acres in the city. It has one of the smallest footprints of colleges it competes with, and has the smallest footprint of the Five Colleges. They have little open land for expansion. When Smith, after acquiring housing and business property immediately abutting the campus, came to me, and said they were interested in expanding into the Green Street neighborhood in order to construct an engineering building, my challenge was-- given the potential loss of both housing and taxes, what should the City do?
Smith College has a right to buy property, and a right to expand. The College has an exemption under the Dover Amendment that allows the City to regulate height and mass, but their right to build has been court-tested, and building an engineering building lies well within their educational exemption.
I want to say that engineering for women is a good thing. Having more women engineers is a home run. As chief elected officer of the city, and with the law solidly reinforcing Smith’s right to purchase property, expand, and build, it is my job to negotiate for the people most affected (rental housing) and for the city’s loss of taxable property. The city would have had a difficult, costly and ultimately unsupportable legal case to defend if we had attempted to stop the expansion. This is an unavoidable reality for neighborhood residents, whose concerns are valid and compelling. One thing about being the leader of a community is to know what you can do and what you can’t do, and to not mislead the public or spend city resources on a losing proposition.
We put together a working group of neighborhood people, Smith College and City representatives. In addition, there was an open charrette (a facilitated protocol which consults all stakeholders) on Smith’s plan; where people said what they wanted to say to Smith about this issue. We looked for strong points of consensus during these processes and found it on a number of issues --but not all.
There was agreement that the neighborhood housing lost to the new building should be replaced as rental housing. There was agreement that we should receive a payment in lieu of taxes, so that the City had no net loss in tax revenues.
One of the other issues was to urge that the engineering building design integrate with the city as an open and approachable space, and avoid being part of a “walled” campus.
I engaged in extensive negotiations with Smith College towards these goals. The interesting thing was that because it was Smith College, we were able to negotiate permanent, legally-binding affordable rental housing as opposed to the more gradual and unavoidable loss of rental housing over time, as we have in other parts of the city; where rental stock becomes condos or is bought by real estate entrepreneurs as spec housing --and rents go up. We emerged with more legally enforceable affordable housing than we had before.
I obtained agreement that required Smith to replace all the rental housing they took down, with affordable housing for people making up to 80% of median income for 99 years. This housing is to be located within one mile of downtown. We expect there will be 78 units in all with 26 slated for the first phase. Smith also agreed to make payments in lieu of taxes for the property taken off the tax rolls. Further, the payments will increase at the same rate that the average tax bill goes up.
We also have an agreement with what we’re going to do about parking, which has been a bone of contention in that neighborhood for a long time. Smith committed to reducing vehicle trips, including: the use of Zip cars; employee parking cash outs; contribution to park-and-ride lots; and higher fees for staff to park. Smith also agreed to keep a commercial presence on the corner of West street and Green Street for the next few years, and created some design parameters to keep the campus having an open and welcoming feel to the community.
While I negotiated the agreement, it required a vote of the Council to become valid. In fact, it required a 2/3 vote. Since two of the Councilors had recused themselves because of conflicts of interest, the agreement would not have gone into effect without the vote of six of the seven Councilors eligible to vote.
I think we arrived at a pretty good deal. When I talk to my municipal colleagues who have been challenged by similar situations with expanding nonprofits, they see it as a great deal. It is important to remember that in our community, our work force is made up of a lot of folks who work in nonprofit institutions. Cooley Dickinson Hospital is our largest employer, followed by Smith College, the VA Hospital, the City of Northampton and ServiceNet. We don’t get to a sizeable local tax paying employer until further down that list to Kollmorgen. While I might wish Smith College was required to pay us taxes on everything, I have to know what’s in my control--and what’s not. The fact of the matter is that they pay more than $500,000 a year in property taxes, they employ many local people, they enrich what happens in our schools and in our community’s art world, they bring a tremendous amount of outsider money into our community that is spent in our restaurants and stores and for local services-- and that money provides many more local jobs. That consistent expenditure of money has a multiplier effect in our community, and that is very, very important.