“New York State is in the midst of a solid-waste crisis. Recent decisions have decreased the long-term capacity of landfills in the state, and there is no landfill currently being considered that will make that situation better.”
— UCRRA press release, February 7, 2025
Persevering against considerable community headwinds, the Ulster County Resource Recovery Agency (UCRRA) under the executive directorship of Marc Rider went ahead on December 6 with issuing a request for proposal (RFP) to solicit an engineering firm which could realize a countywide landfill.
A little over a month later, UCRRA has announced that it’s backed off from selection of a contractor. The reason, Rider says, has nothing to do with community opposition. “We only got one response,” said Rider. “If you don’t get at least two, there’s probably something that was wrong with the RFP.”
When he solicited the feedback of the scores of engineering firms which should have traditionally been interested, Rider says what he heard made him think.
“If we find an alternative solution that could actually change some of our requirements for the landfill,” he said, “then maybe we’re looking at a smaller footprint.”
Siting a landfill hasn’t been taken off the table, it’s just been pushed to the side for the near future. Rather than leading with a landfill siting study, the agency now intends to identify likely alternative waste-processing solutions like hydrolysis, anaerobic digestion and bio-gasification. Pushing siting back a half year of two will hardly make a difference. The lives of landfills, like the lives of glaciers, play out over enormous spans of time.
Assuming the last landfill siting study had identified the perfect location, and that an engineering design and permit application had been prepared and submitted to DEC, and had the DEC approved it, only then could the new facility have been constructed.
To site, design and obtain permits for a new landfill is a long process. Rider says to expect a minimum of ten years to pass from the time a commitment is made to the time that the landfill can be opened for waste disposal in the best of conditions. And that timeline hasn’t taken into account the response of a public not eager to see a landfill sited in its back yard.
When the UCRRA commissioned HydroQuest to screen for potential landfill properties in Ulster County in 2021, it did so if not in secrecy, then very softly and very quietly. Identifying nine potential candidate sites, HydroQuest ultimately proposed just two, both in Plattekill, for continued evaluation.
When the fact of the study and its recommendations were leaked to the press, the director of UCRRA at the time, Greg Olivieri, who came on after it was conducted, was stuck having to acknowledge the study to an outraged public. Soon after the Town of Plattekill was preemptively disqualified from consideration as a feasible location for a new county landfill.
Ulster County’s Local Solid Waste Management Plan (LSWMP), adopted by the county legislature in 2021, says a site needs to be selected. With Olivieri now gone, executive director Rider has made no motions to disguise the agency’s efforts to locate a landfill, no matter how unpopular the idea.
This most recent study performed by Cornerstone in 2024 identified two likely spots in Wawarsing. As with Plattekill, when word got out the resistance from Wawarsing electeds and constituents followed swiftly.
“The last meeting we had 20 to 25 people in from Wawarsing,” Rider said. “And I know they have often felt they’ve been referred to as you know, quote, unquote, the dumping grounds of the county.”
In spite of his seeing the mandate of the legislature through, Rider knows better than most just what it is he was proposing.
“I grew up in that situation,” Rider said. “For the first ten years of my life [in Spokane County, Washington], my street dead-ended into a fence which just behind was the countywide landfill. We had to have municipal water lines come out because we couldn’t drink out of our well.”
By his teens, Rider recalls, the county had closed the county landfill in favor of an incinerator-waste-to-energy plant. And that transition, in one combination of technologies or another, is the likely path forward in Ulster.
As the technologies have grown more sophisticated, Rider says other countries in Europe and Asia have arrived at the same solution. “It’s really popular in Japan,” said Rider, “where the shipping fee for a landfill is $250 a ton.”
Currently, shipping fees are $135 a ton in Ulster County.
Rider sees the idea that each municipality in Ulster County should maintain its own landfill to deal with the waste it generates as cost-prohibitive. “A countywide landfill being $200 million doesn’t mean a landfill four percent of its size is going to be four percent of the cost,” he says.
Neither is the construction of a biogas facility maintained by UCRRA viewed as feasible.
“What we’re really looking to do,” said Rider, ” is a feedstock agreement where we agree that for the next 20 years or so we’re going to give [a biogas operation] our waste, or a percentage of our waste, and we pay a per-ton.”
The key for Rider is for the county to become self-reliant and thus resilient rather than dependent upon a mega-landfill somewhere else to send the county’s trash. Whatever combination is adopted, the next RFP should indicate the agency’s thinking.
Regardless, in no future of dazzling technologies will the entire amount of refuse be made to disappear.
“We will shift our focus back to a landfill at some point, once we find out what other alternative solutions are available,” Rider predicts. “When we know just what portion of the waste will be able to be met by those alternative solutions and what portion of the waste we’re going to have to figure out a landfill situation for, which to me still ideally is within our county boundaries.”
Offered the bait of commenting on whether Rosendale or Woodstock might be perfect locales for a county-wide landfill, Rider dodged the snare. “I have no idea,” he said. “I don’t have anything in particular in mind.”
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