Allan Appel Photo
With calls of “stop trashing New Haven” and “don’t dump on us,” a local activist rallied a management team to write a formal letter of opposition to a local recycler’s proposal to accept wet or putrescible garbage down in the port district.
Residents also agreed to up the ante of their protest by showing up an hour before a Dec. 18 City Plan Commission meeting and to make their point with paints and posters as well.
Twenty residents, at the regular meeting of the Quinnipiac East Community Management team at the Bishop Woods School, heard activist Chris Ozyck trash Murphy Road Recycling’s plan to truck in to its 19 Wheeler St. plant and process garbage from towns outside of New Haven.
Environmental activist Chris Ozyck in the foreground.
Murphy Road, in a recent appearance before the City Services and Environmental Policy subcommittee of the Board of Alders, had agreed to scrap its proposal for a major $4 million enhancement of its plan and equipment in order to process tons of garbage.
The reason the company offered was an uproar from neighbors about the environmental injustice of the plan.
Ozyck, however, is going ahead with his protest and organizing others to do the same because the company is still proceeding, albeit on a far smaller scale, with a state application to permit this new use, the processing of garbage, currently not permitted, on the site.
Murphy has already applied to the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) to modify the transfer station’s use to authorize the “receipt, storage, and consolidation of putrescible municipal solid waste,” according to a July letter sent by state Waste Engineering and Enforcement Division (WEED) Director Robert Isner to the Board of Alders. The state has not yet ruled on Murphy’s application. Murphy’ Attorney Ed Spinella said that the company’s application for a special permit for such a use should be heard in December by New Haven’s City Plan Commission.
“The only thing that will occur is that putrescible waste will be part of the waste stream to go into the facility,” Spinella said. “It will still be tipped indoors, processed indoors, and transferred on the same day.”
“I’m very concerned,” Ozyck said, “about a small thing getting in and then expanding.”
He reminded his listeners that “this is the most impacted area of the city in terms of environmental pollution,” with 30 percent of the population under age 18, and lots of young people with asthma.
“We need people to show up at city plan and to say ‘No Trashing Us,” Ozyck declared.
Ozyck said he is concerned that even though there has been previous loud opposition, “They are trying to sneak this through before the end of this administration.”
Ozyck was supported in his case by Pierre Barbour, the director of the New Haven Solid Waste Recycling Authority, who reported that “the current proposal is for up to 50,000 tons from towns up to 30 miles from New Haven.”
Environment-focussed artist Joann Moran.
In spite of the company’s protestations and plans to move the waste out expeditiously, “a lot of residue stays behind. The plant gets backed up,” he said.
Ozyck called the addition of this new processing stream detrimental to a neighborhood disproportionaly burdened with such facilities. He said the company should set up elsewhere, in Hamden, for example.
Most of the state delegation has written to state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection in opposition, Ozyck reported.
“The good news is that people have an opportunity to speak out,” added Barbour.
Local artist Joann Moran volunteered to be at the 7 p.m. hearing an hour early, bearing art supplies, so that those who want to speak out can do so not only with words, but with visual opposition as well.
Ozyck said he has plans to visit Fair Haven’s community management team meeting on Thursday and others the following week to rally the troops to appear at the Dec. 18 City Plan session.