The Ulster County Resource Recovery Agency announced on May 22 that it would abandon the idea of siting a landfill anywhere in Ulster County. Instead, said executive director Marc Rider, the agency would focus its energies on reducing the amount of waste — presently 385 tons trucked off 250 miles away annually at a cost of $11 million to the largest landfill in New York State, Seneca Meadows.
By a June 13 deadline, Rider hopes to have a pool of contractors to choose from responding to his request for proposals for the design, permitting, construction and operation of a facility which will be used to divert solid waste from the landfill.
Plasma arc gasification, bio-gasification, hydrolysis, pyrolysis, anaerobic digestion and mechanical separation of waste (known as a Dirty MRF) are all among the processes up for consideration. Contractors building incinerators need not apply.
“Let’s get this RFP back and see what alternatives people are proposing,” Rider said.
Rider made it a point to dismiss the gossip that the agency’s decision had anything to do with citizen pushback which arose whenever any municipality was suggested for landfill placement. In 2023, residents of Plattekill protested so loudly that a resolution was passed ruling out Plattekill for the placement of any landfill ever. This year, with Wawarsing in the crosshairs, residents attended legislature and agency board meetings to share their displeasure. Wawarsing legislator Craig Lopez duly introduced a resolution to keep any landfill out of Wawarsing’s back yard.
Though he isn’t an engineer, Rider said that the day before the announcement he travelled down to Wawarsing to visit the two potential landfill sites. He wanted to reinforce for himself what was at stake.
“Here is what it is,” Rider said. “We could spend $500,000 over the next year trying to determine whether the sites were feasible. Then we could spend another year trying to negotiate out prices and trying to acquire the properties. And we could go through this whole process, which, for various reasons very likely could end up not siting a landfill, or we could stop and say, let’s actually do the work that is within our mission first.”
Pyramids and programming
When the goal is waste reduction, organizing categories in an inverted pyramid effectively communicates the diminishing opportunities available on the path from waste creation to disposal.
At the fattest top level is the manufacturer’s responsibility to reduce the chemically dangerous or non-biodegradable materials manufactured to a point where they don’t exist. A level beneath are the distributors who purchase these products in bulk to sell them to the retailers. A third level down contains the consumers who will signal their desires with their dollars.
To affect these top three levels of the pyramid, all the UCRRA can do is preach environmental literacy.
In 2024, programming encouraging consideration for the environment, curated by agency director of sustainability Angelina Brandt, was shared at 47 speaking events, 18 facility tours, 22 tabling events, as well as in classes and special events which the agency estimates reached an estimated 2271 adults and 1511 youth participants.
Once the waste stream has begun to flow, all that’s left for the agency is to reduce, recycle and recover. Rider reiterated the agency’s goal is to reduce 30 percent of the amount of waste the county generates by 2030, 60 percent by 2040. By 2050, only an irreducible amount would remain to dispose of — about ten percent of waste that can’t be handled in any other way. “Zero waste is truly 90 percent,” said Rider.
Of the 11,808 tons of recoverable materials the agency removed from the waste stream in 2024 — materials like scrap metal, mixed news, cardboard, glass, cleanwood, rubble and e-waste — 5000 tons were food waste. Pending permission from the DEC for a permit modification, the agency would like to see that number increased to 7500 tons.
An agency reform committee convened by the county supports that goal, recommending the adoption of legislation requiring the separation of all food scraps and organics from the rest of the waste. Add another colored trash can.
A struggle over bonding
Negotiations are also under way to see the next ten-year service agreement between the agency and the county approved by the legislature, a document which for the last 35 years has identified the placement of a landfill as one of the agency’s reasons to exist.
The last service agreement expired on March 31, but an extension of 60 days was granted to allow for further negotiations between the county executive’s office and the agency. Now holding the up process are legislators leery of language surrendering their bonding oversight.
In the expiring contract, the bonding cap was set at $500,000. Because he wished to bond out $10 million for the purchase of a property off Flatbush Avenue along with necessary equipment, Rider was forced in March to seek the legislature’s approval.
“If you look at how the vote went,” Rider said, “just to get us to have the bond temporarily raised to $10 million, I think it got 15 votes. And any bonding we want to do requires 16 votes, so [going forward with a cap] we can’t get anything accomplished.”
While Rider said the agency wants to retain the county as a partner, he also noted that partnership with the county was not mandatory.
“We want a contract with the county,” Rider said. “But we also can’t have clauses in there that unilaterally impose a cap on our ability to bond. I’ve spent the last six months working with the county attorney and the executive’s office on negotiating what I believe is a fair contract,” said Rider. “That contract doesn’t have a bonding cap. It also doesn’t have an ability for the agency to charge the county a net service fee.”
The net service fee, essentially a subsidy paid by the county to make up agency budget shortfalls, became superfluous after the agency became self-sufficient by the granting of a waste operation monopoly in 2012.
Including grants, sales of assets and investments, the agency reported approximately $19.9 million in operating revenues last year.
Reasons for resistance
Some legislators like Joe Maloney would like to see the agency pay back the service fees it received during the lean years. “We paid $37 million and never got a dime back,” Maloney said. “I hope that’s part of the negotiation.”
With or without a contract, one of the agency’s short-term strategies to chip away at the waste tonnage being shipped upstate is the construction and operation of a re-use innovation center, a facility used to reclaim thrown-out items for repair and resale.
It was for this project that Rider went before the legislature to get his bond cap temporarily lifted, and it was the responses offered there which served as a representative microcosm of the struggle between the forces of reform and resistance to change in the world of waste management.
“This picker’s store or whatever you want to call it,” said legislator Eric Kitchen, referring to the re-use innovation center. “I don’t know why the county would be in the business of wasting the taxpayers’ money to get into the used antique junk business.”
Minority leader Kevin Roberts put it even more succinctly. “It’s going to be a $10 million boondoggle, and we should vote no on it,” he said.
A social and political problem
As a public authority, the resource recovery center is a component affiliated with, but not a part of the county government. As such, the county is not responsible for any debt the agency generates. And if Rider can get the legislature to cut the apron strings of bonding approval, net service-fee obligations keeping fiscally conservative legislators up at night would likewise be a problem of the past.
While Rider attempts to justify the abandonment of the decades-long push to see a regional landfill sited in the county, whatever happens next with the agency’s composting operation so far is one accomplishment it can point to.
In a 1971 speech before the county legislature, Ulster county planner Herbert Hekler said: “The old method of refuse disposal was the town dump, a stinking, rat-infested, no-man’s land.”
This was at a time when 46 landfills still operated in the county. Hekler did not recommend shipping out the waste the county generated, then 4.8 pounds per day per resident and now four pounds a day. A consultant’s study backing him, Hekler recommended as the best and cheapest solution for the county a scientifically sound, responsibly maintained landfill.
“The problem,” Hekler explained to the politicians, “is not a technical problem which can be addressed in an engineering planning report, but rather it is a social and political problem. I forgot who said it, but politics is the art of the possible. We certainly hope that you, the elected leaders of this county, can … select the possible alternatives to provide a good solution to this very difficult problem.”
Fifty-four years later, and still no landfill. But the timing is complicated. It always is.
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