The Upper East Side is getting so trashy. Finally. After more than six years of fighting NIMBYs, the Bloomberg Administration's controversial plan to put a waste-transfer station in Yorkville (beside the Asphalt Green) has come a bit closer to reality. The $240 million project just got federal approval. So yeah, some neighbors, and the politicians who represent them, are not happy.
"I am disappointed that the Army Corps issued a permit," City Council Member Jessica Lappin said in a statement. "This facility will obviously harm marine life in the East River, our air quality, and our densely populated residential neighborhoods."
The Bloomberg Administration doesn't agree with that assessment, pushing for the center as a way to make sure each borough does its fair share in dealing with the city's trash while also reducing "the number of trucks used to transport trash by relying more on barges." As Cas Holloway, the city's deputy mayor for operations, puts it, the plan would "help double the city's recycling rate, move trash via barge instead of trucks to cut down on emissions and traffic, and ensure that every borough bears some responsibility for handling its own waste." Right now Manhattan is the only borough without a transfer station.
For some numbers: about 700 tons of trash a day would be processed at the Manhattan site—though some opponents say that number is deceptively low. Assemblyman Micah Z. Kellner, who has filed a lawsuit to stop the center, tells the Times that:
since 2006 the city has not moved forward on two other key parts of its plan in Manhattan: building a recycling center on Gansevoort Street in Greenwich Village; and modifying a recycling center on West 59th Street to receive commercial waste.
As a result, he said in the interview, the volume of waste coming into the 91st Street station would be greater than the city originally stated — a modification of the waste-management plan that requires new approval from the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation and the City Council.
But of course Bloomberg's people don't agree with that, either, telling the paper "the Gansevoort Street recycling center would begin operations in late 2016 or early 2017 and the station on West 59th Street would be modified to receive commercial waste at that time."
If the city gets its way, and now that the Army Corps of Engineers have OK'd the plan it looks more and more like it will, trucks of trash will be rolling by thousands of kids at the Asphalt Green on a daily basis starting in 2015. Of course, there are a few more lawsuits to work through before that happens.
