Transfer Station Trashed
Trash it.
That was the verdict of the Jersey City Planning Board and City Council on a proposed garbage Transfer station for the Greenville Yards.
In votes last night and Tuesday night, the two bodies overwhelmingly supported amendments to the Greenville Yards Redevelopment Plan banning the construction of garbage transfer stations there.
The Planning Board voted 7-0 on Tuesday to recommend the amendments, authored by Ward A, Greenville, Councilman Robert Cavanaugh. The City Council voted 8-0 yesterday to approve the amendments as ordinances. Ward E, Downtown, Councilman Mariano Vega was absent.
The votes would appear to kill the plan of waste-hauling giant Browning Ferris Industries of New York to move 6,000 tons a day of New York garbage through the Greenville Yards from marine barges to rail cars headed for out-of-state landfills.
"Stick a fork in it - it's done," Council President Tom DeGise said of the proposal.
New York is considering the bids of BFI and four other competitors to help it export its residential Garbage because Staten Island's Fresh Kills Landfill is to close at the end of 2001.
"The problem is with this word, garbage," said BFI spokesman Alan Marcus. "This is a commodity to be shipped. If we called it 'Formica table tops' we wouldn't have this kind of emotional confrontation."
BFI promised the city $5 million to $10 million in taxes and tipping fees to sell the station, but residents weren't buying.
Fearful of the potential for odor and disease, more than 5,000 Greenville residents signed petitions opposing the garbage station, and more than 400 packed the City Council chambers for the votes.
BFI executive David Iverson promised the Planning Board that the garbage station would be built so that residents "never smell, see, or hear the waste."
The boisterous sign-waving crowd booed in response, and over the din, one man shouted, "Oh come on! Only you guys won't smell it."
The crowd, made up of Jersey City residents, old and new, lined up for nearly three hours to speak out against the garbage station.
"I live just four doors down from Linden Avenue East and I see those shiny new light rail cars zipping by," said Frances Oakley, a Princeton Avenue resident since 1954. "I can't think how sad it would be to have them riding right along next to garbage trains."
"The mayor calls this city a slice of heaven," said Mary Frances Strong, who also lives in Oakley's east Greenville neighborhood. "When did garbage become an ingredient to the pie?"
The largest contingent of protesters came from Port Liberte, the luxury waterfront condominium a quarter-mile up river from the proposed garbage station.
"Why do we want to turn the Gold Coast into the garbage coast?" asked Port Liberte resident Anna Freed.
Her Port Liberte neighbor, microbiologist Micael Withers, described the garbage station as "potential Foodfest for germs, bacteria and pathogenic molds."
One of the largest employers now located in the Greenville Yards, Tropicana Juices, told the Planning Board it did not want a garbage transfer station for a neighbor.
"This year, 250 million gallons of the world's finest juices will be shipped to Jersey City from our Florida processing facilities," wrote Tropicana Senior Vice President Thomas Ryan.
"Our Jersey City Distribution Center would be a direct neighbor to the proposed garbage transfer station. Clearly this use is completely incompatible with our operations."
Ryan said Tropicana, which has 182 workers employed in the Yards, "would be forced to review the status of Jersey City and its continued importance" if the garbage station was approved.
Thomas Durkin, the attorney for Tilcon, the company whose land was condemned by the Jersey City Redevelopment Agency to make way for the garbage station, said his client would fight the project to the bitter end in the courts.
City Planning Director Robert Cotter reported that Greenville Yards and Port Jersey should be developed with an eye toward becoming a leading regional port, and said the station is "not a proper use for the site."
Cotter also countered the argument, raised by a representative of the Manhattan-based Tri-State Transportation Campaign, that if the city didn't accept a garbage station, it would be saddled with a never-ending stream of trucks carrying the New York garbage.
"New York has as many as 14 waterbourne avenues, including an excellent site in Staten Island now under construction by NYDOS - it is not just a choice of taking this station or taking the trucks," Cotter said.