Thomas Breen photo
One of the entrances to 19 Wheeler St. in the Annex.
Zoom
Wednesday night’s City Plan Commission virtual meeting.
Wet trash from the suburbs will hurt local children with asthma, “frail” Fair Haven seniors, and Quinnipiac River oysters struggling to survive.
A host of city health officials, alders, environmentalists, Fair Haven neighbors, and local business owners offered those warnings during the latest virtual public hearing about the controversial planned expansion of an Annex waste transfer station.
That Zoomed public hearing took place Wednesday night during the most recent regular monthly meeting of the City Plan Commission.
For an hour and a half, city residents, officials, and business owners spoke up against Murphy Road Recycling’s application to accept up to 500 tons of putrescible municipal solid waste — aka, wet household garbage — from surrounding towns at its current transfer station at 19 Wheeler St.
The company’s planned operational expansion has sparked public controversy, and vocal opposition, for years. Wednesday’s public hearing was the second time in as many weeks that local opponents have urged the City Plan Commission to turn down Murphy Road Recycling’s local special permit application. (Murphy Road needs separate permits from the state and the city.)
The hearing also took place one day after Mayor Justin Elicker and a group of Fair Haven neighbors staged a press conference along the river in which they spoke out against the expansion, which was soon followed by the transfer station managers accusing New Haveners of NIMBYism during a state environmental hearing regarding a separate but related application. No vote was taken at the hearing.
“Every few years, there’s one of these kinds of things that we have to deal with and we have to testify about why we don’t want to be dumped on,” longtime Fair Haven resident Christel Manning said with exasperation during the public hearing. “It’s just getting really old.”
The City Plan Commission continued the public hearing on the matter until Jan. 20, 2021, when Murphy Road Recycling’s attorney plans to respond in full to warnings of air and water pollution, increased truck traffic, bad smells, rodent infestations, and dropping property values that members of the public and city-hired consultants have offered over the course of the multi-part public hearing.
Maya McFadden photos
Christel Manning, center, protests plant’s expansion Tuesday.
Some of the people who turned out to the virtual hearing Wednesday night to oppose Murphy Road Recycling’s application included:
• City Health Department Director Maritza Bond. She said 14 percent of adult New Haveners already suffer from asthma, compared to 11 percent of adults statewide; 23 percent of adults in the city’s low-income, predominantly African American and Latinx neighborhoods have asthma, compared to 14 percent statewide; and New Haven has 75 asthma-related hospitalizations per 10,000 residents, compared to 14 per 10,000 statewide.
“Studies found that children living in close proximity to waste collection sites were more likely to visit the emergency department for asthma
symptoms or have an asthma-related hospitalization,” she continued, “even with short-term increases in air pollution. Adults living near such vicinities are at increased risk for dying from a stroke. Additional studies found that 78 percent of the survey respondents who lived near a solid waste collection site reported adverse health effects, including eye irritation and body weakness.”
She urged the commissioners to turn down the application, and to consider the impacts “on not only the environment but on the health and well-being of your constituents, especially the young children who live near Wheeler Street.”
• Fair Haven Heights Alder Rosa Ferraro Santana and Prospect Hill/Newhallville Alder Steve Winter. “I am very concerned about the health and welfare of our children walking to and around that facility, in and around the neighborhoods around that particular place,” Ferraro-Santana said. “I believe it is a detriment to our neighbors and to the city.”
Winter agreed. “It is such a grave injustice to be adding waste to what’s really the heart of our city, where so many neighborhoods, so many waterways converge. To be doing so as a dumping ground for suburban communities, when our city is already shouldering one of the highest levels of asthma in the entire country as well as many other respiratory illnesses” would be a “huge step in the wrong direction.”
• Mary Wade Home CEO David Hunter. He said the Fair Haven nursing home’s residents are “among the frailest” seniors in the city, and that the proposed expansion to add up to 500 tons a day of putrescible municipal solid waste “would negatively impact air quality and contribute to an environmental catastrophe overall for Fair Haven.”
• Neighbor Kat Calhoun. She said the expansion would likely add noise, light, and air pollution to the area, as well as an “unacceptable risk of creating additional contamination of the Quinnipiac River and adjacent shorelines.”
• John Hilts of the Norm Bloom & Sons oyster farm company. He warned that an increase of trucks and wet waste at the Annex site will “inevitably result in runoff into the waterway,” which would degrade the water quality of the Quinnipiac River and endanger the grounds his company uses for oyster propagation. “I feel it has no redeeming value,” he said of the planned trash plant expansion. He said it would only hurt the river, the neighborhood, and the oysters.
• And Manning, who lives across the river on Front Street. Although the special permit application would not increase the total amount of allowable trash to be trucked in and trucked out of the transfer station, she said, it would almost certainly allow Murphy Road Recycling to increase its actual daily operations, which are currently only at half capacity. “They’re currently not at capacity,” she said. “So if they switch to the type of waste that nobody else wants to take, which is stinky waste, my hunch is that they are going to expand. Businesses exist to make money. … This proposal means that we are going to have more waste processed in Fair Haven.”
The one person to speak out in support of the application Wednesday night was Mario Lainez, who said he is the site manager for Murphy Road Recycling at the current 19 Wheeler St. transfer station.
He said he has worked for the company for 18 years.
“I believe that the transferring of the product is very clean,” he said through a Spanish language interpreter. “I have a very good system that smells very good. I’m a clean person. I spend a lot more time at work than I spend at home. I would not like to be working in a place that’s dirty and smelly.”
Meaghan Miles, the attorney for Murphy Road Recycling, said she plans to respond to all of the criticism leveled against the company and the application at the next City Plan Commission meeting.
She did make one comment before the meeting was up.
“The site is not a dump,” she said. “It’s a transfer station.”