A seven-member county committee formed to review and suggest reforms to the operations, policies and enabling legislation of the Ulster County Resource Recovery Agency (UCRRA) held its inaugural meeting on Thursday, December 7. The resolution to form the committee, sponsored by legislators Joe Maloney and Eric Stewart, had passed the county legislature unanimously on October 17.
Members included veteran legislator Manna Jo Greene, chair of the UCRRA board of directors Andrew Ghiorse, county comptroller March Gallagher, deputy county executive Amanda Lavalle, legislature chair Tracey Bartels, minority designee legislator Laura Petit, and Mike Baden, president of the county association of town supervisors and mayors.
The committee voted for Baden to chair it, and Bartels was chosen as vice-chair.
A pressing issue for the committee will be the March 2024 expiration of the agency’s contractual agreement with Ulster County.
Created in 1987, UCCRA is a public authority separate from the oversight traditionally exercised by conventional components of the county government. Whether this relationship should continue or whether the agency should be absorbed into county government or even be privatized was a point of discussion.
“I think historically looking at the creation of the agency, with the directive to site a landfill and to separate it from the legislature, the political cover,” said Bartels, “that’s the history of why it started. That original agency failed, and we’re here now with an agency that has a fraught relationship with the legislature, with the public, with the towns and with the comptroller. I mean, we’ve seen challenges.”
Foremost on Ghiorse’s mind was the likelihood that siting a county landfill was most likely still years away. He worried that the county would be left vulnerable if it were to continue to dispose of its waste in the same way it has been, driving its trailer-truckloads several hours away to Seneca Meadows in the Finger Lakes region.
“If something happens to Seneca Meadows,” said Ghiorse, “because Sullivan County, and Greene County go there also now, and plus a myriad of others, we don’t have anything contracted [somewhere else]. So if something happened and it got shut down, everybody’s going to try to go someplace else, and we might be last in line and then we’re going to be stuck.”
He suggested looking into finding an alternative site “because I’m thinking of some kind of catastrophe that hopefully never happens.”
Gallagher noted that much of the organization of the agency was out-of-date and on shaky legal footing.
“I’m hoping that this body here, this committee can come forward with some recommendations to the organizing documents for the era that would assist them in better governance and meeting the objectives overall with the county,” she said. “There are a number of organizing documents for this organization that are not up to snuff under state law. I have a copy of the bylaws. They haven’t been updated since 2011.”
Manna Jo Greene considered where the re-use innovation center was going to be placed a most urgent question.
“Who’s in charge of it, whether it’ll be the UCRRA, whether it’ll be the county or some other entity,” she said. “The other thing is that Laura, Tracey, I and others have been working on a zero-waste implementation plan for longer than we would like to remember. At least two years. The point of that was to address a whole picture of waste diversion. There are a lot of materials that can be pulled out of the waste stream. So I think that’s a second task.”
Legislator Petit recognized the importance of Ulster’s system of transfer stations, unique among the counties. Under the existing contract, the UCRRA, not the legislature, would have to add more materials to the list of recyclables.
“I think that clearly that where we need to start is with the state Public Authorities Law that enabled the organization in the first place,” said committee chair Baden. “And the contract between the county and the RRA, given that we only have six months to finish this.”
The group daydreamed briefly about the necessity of citing a landfill in Ulster County and naming it after two of the legislators.
“Which in jest we say will be called the Petit-Greene landfill,” said Greene.
“Hopefully it’ll be very petite and very green,” offered Gallagher.
The committee has until June 7 to provide a written report of its findings and recommendations to the Ulster County Legislature.
Mike Baden, Rochester town supervisor
Interview with the chair of the Ulster County Resource Recovery Reform Committee
Rokosz Most: Just the other day at the inaugural reform committee [meeting], you were elected the chair. What’s your interest in this in this reform committee?
Mike Baden: As a town supervisor for the last six years, I’ve been very aware of problems that municipalities have had with the UCRRA. I’ve gone to some of their meetings, looked at the legislatures issues and the sort of round robin of board members that have gone through the UCRRA over the last few years. But in the resolution from the legislature, they awarded a seat to the president of the supervisors association, which I am.
RM: You just you’re a joiner, huh
MB: I am. At last count, this is now county committee number eight that I sit on.
RM: You must have a lot of energy.
MB: I was the vice-president for the last five years and supervisor [James] Quigley from Ulster decided he did not want to continue in 2023. So the body elected me.
It could be myself or my designee. But I think that I’m pretty up to speed on everything that’s going on. I chose to appoint myself to it.
RM: Are you a Democrat?
MB: I am but I will say on the local level municipalities party really doesn’t matter. We all face the same challenges, we all face the same problems. We’re not setting policy on women’s rights and gay rights and gun control. We’re keeping the roads open, we’re keeping the garbage taken care of, we’re dealing with local zoning and some of us have police departments to run — but we’re all doing the same job.
It’s not a Republican-Democrat thing. It’s a matter of is the person doing the job or not doing the job in the town.
RM: Does the Town of Rochester have dual-stream recycling?
MB: Yes, Every transfer station actually has to. The City of Kingston is the only one that uses single-stream, and they actually pay extra for the ability to do that.
RM: My understanding is that there’s something like 13 permitted haulers right now, trash haulers, and a number of them apparently have waivers where they can still collect single-stream.
MB: Municipalities are required to use the UCCRA for recycling. The private haulers are not under flow control, they must bring their municipal solid waste [MSW] to the UCRRA. However, the recycling they can choose to do with it as they choose.
RM: Is it a problem that we’re mingling recycling with the solid waste?
MB: Absolutely. Any amount of diversion is a big deal. Anything that we can divert from the waste stream is less tonnage that we’re hauling up to Seneca Meadows. The amount of money that the UCCRA spends each year in just the contract for transportation is staggering.
RM: It’s around nine million dollars a year.
MB: This is my opinion. I think the UCICRA has to sometimes be willing to not make a profit or breakeven or even maybe lose funding in order to recycle items that they’re not currently recycling because they say we can’t afford to recycle it.
Things like pizza boxes are a big example. They refuse to take pizza boxes in the cardboard, because they say they’ve got grease stains or a lot of people throw things into the boxes, don’t empty them out, toss them into the recycling. It contaminates the recycling, so they refuse to take them, but there are other places that are that are doing recycling of pizza boxes.
The end product, the amount of contamination, is so small it’s not affecting them. So, you know, some of these hard lines in the sand have been drawn as to what’s recyclable and what’s not. I think we need to rethink a lot of that.
RM: You mentioned recycling mattresses.
MB: Recycling mattresses is something I truly support. I never would have thought about it, but my transfer station alone probably gets 20, 30 mattresses and box springs a month. Part of the reason I wanted to sit on this committee is Rochester is one of the largest users in terms of tonnage per year. We are number two or three, almost every year in the amount of MSW that goes through a transfer station. That’s simply because we’re such a rural community, over 50 percent of our properties use our transfer station.
Many other municipalities that are much more like a village or a little more urban, people contract with a hauler and put their cans out. Every year at the end of the year, when I get the reports from the RRA, we have to do a waste report to both the RRA and to the DEC every year in February. Every municipality who runs a transfer station has to do that.
When I see the comparisons, it’s really staggering to me to see how much more volume we did than some other municipalities that you would think would be bigger. City of Kingston obviously is a big user. But we’re usually two or three in that list, in comparison to other towns that are much bigger.
RM: How do see the work of this reform committee going forward?
MB: As far as the outcome with the committee, I was going to see where it goes. We’re going to push through, and we’re probably going to meet twice a month and maybe more for the end. We’ve got seven very knowledgeable people on the topics. I’m excited. I’m a little exhausted already thinking about six months [to complete out work]. But I’m excited by the possibilities.
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