Safety-Kleen’s David Paquette and Richard Domschine with local attorney Hugh Manke.
A used oil-recycling company in the Annex won permission to build eight new storage tanks and two new rail spurs on its existing site — paving the way for more train transport, fewer truck trips, and the planned future storage of used anti-freeze.
The company, Safety-Kleen Systems, Inc., earned that unanimous approval Wednesday night during the regular monthly meeting of the City Plan Commission on the second floor of City Hall.
Less than two weeks after receiving a favorable recommendation from an aldermanic committee in the company’s bid to purchase a city-owned stretch of Waterfront Street for $100,000, Safety-Kleen received unanimous sign-offs from commissioners for its site plan, coastal site plan, and special permit applications for reconfiguring and expanding its existing used oil transfer station at 120 Forbes Ave.
The company, a subsidiary of the Massachusetts-based waste disposal company Clean Harbors, plans to build eight new storage tanks within the site’s existing containment berm to store 2,773,740 gallons of used oil, according to the City Plan Department’s staff report on the applications. The current volume stored on site, according to that report, is 2,609,740 gallons.
The company also plans to replace its existing concrete truck loading dock with a new one, and build two new rail spurs from an existing set of train tracks on the north side of Forbes Avenue.
That rail extension will allow for four Providence and Worcester Railroad-operated train cars at a time to go directly onto Safety-Kleen’s site to pick up used motor oil and transport it to a re-refinery the company owns in Canada, local attorney Hugh Manke explained Wednesday. The new direct train access should cut down the total annual number of truck trips to and from the site by 700.
“There has been a tank farm at this location for a very long time,” Manke said. Probably around 100 years, he said. And the proposed expansion, just like the current operations, only has to do with storage, not processing, of liquid waste. “We’re definitely not dealing with solid waste,” he said.
Environmental Advisory Council member Kathleen Fay and Chair Laura Cahn.
City Environmental Advisory Council (EAC) Laura Cahn and EAC member Kathleen Fay testified at Wednesday’s meeting — in full-fledged support of the proposed expansion.
The company has been exceptionally responsive to all of the council’s requests for information about the potential environmental impact of the expansion, Cahn said. They’ve already started cleaning up contaminated soil on the site. They haven’t had any major spills during their many years of operating the site. They’ll be reducing annual truck trips through the addition of the rail spurs. They’ve committed to hiring locally through New Haven Works for the additional positions that the planned expansion will create. And they’ll be relocating an emergency hazard clean-up crew from Seymour to New Haven as part of this project, thereby increasing the number of experts in the area who can respond to any kind of emergency spill response.
“We hope that Safety-Kleen’s ultimate plan is to have us not use any motor oil,” Cahn said. But until then, she said, she and Fay supported the project and urged the company to stay in touch with neighbors and step up their community education efforts regarding what kind of work they currently do on the site and its associated environmental impact.
Local Safety-Kleen operating manager Richard Domschine said that the company currently is permitted to store and transfer around 10 million gallons of used oil on site every year. Its actual current storage capacity and workflow, he said, however, means that the company moves only around 4.5 to 5 million gallons per year. This planned expansion, he said, would allow the company to increase the amount of used oil that comes through the New Haven site every year to over 7 million gallons.
Near the end of the public hearing on the proposed expansion, Manke and Domschine mentioned that the company stores only used oil on its New Haven site — for now. It also has an application in with state environmental regulatory agencies to use one of the prospective new storage tanks for used anti-freeze. That material would also only be stored on site, Manke said, and then transported elsewhere for processing.
If the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) signs off on the anti-freeze storage modification, Westville Alder and City Plan Commissioner Adam Marchand said, will the company have to come before the commission again for that change in use?
“If there is a modification,” Manke said, “and if the staff, in their discretion, feels that this is a significant issue for planning and zoning in New Haven, then we can be brought before your commission again.”
“We’ve already talked about the permit application,” Domschine said about conversations between Safety-Kleen and DEEP about potential used anti-freeze storage on site. “It’s going for recycling,” he said. “Just the same as the oil. It’s only transfer.”