GUEST COLUMN: Trash planning process derailing?
by Claudia Mills
posted 03/27/2009
It is dismaying to learn that the letter writing campaign initiated by neighbors to the Beaverton Valley site (and propagated by mass emailing) for renovation of our transfer station seems to be swaying the opinions of the County Council about the best site for a new or expanded solid waste transfer facility on San Juan Island. Many citizens are presently unhappy about the amount of money spent in a 3 year site-selection process, and seem then, in protest to this expense, to want to toss out the many, many months of seriously studying the problem by citizens on the SWAC committee and by Public Works and Planning employees who traveled the entire distance with SWAC. Few of the letter writers and none of the present County Council attended many, if any, of this seemingly endless series of (public) meetings, which did nevertheless explore the problem and possible solutions in great detail. Yet the CC seems on the verge of tossing the recommendations of those who studied the problem in depth in favor of an emotional last-minute, letter-writing campaign.
I would like to add some comments that address some of the issues. I have attended nearly every meeting about the site selection process since about 2002 and a large portion of public meetings about the San Juan Island "dumpsite" for some 25 years. I live about ¼ mile away from, and not adjacent to, the Sutton Road site.
- The county has just gone through a long and careful, if incredibly tedious, process to try to choose the best site for its solid waste transfer station of the future. Having attended nearly every meeting in this process, I know exactly how SWAC arrived at its decision. That process has been open, with every meeting advertised and open to the public. The committee has done everything it could think of to enlist public participation in the site selection process, including site tours at least three times. The process resulted in a draft EIS that had a standard, advertised comment period, and the public had every possibility to comment on its problems. Now SWAC has made a recommendation about a new site, which I believe was backed by the best possible (and very expensive) selection process. Not liking the decision, a set of neighbors has started a letter-writing campaign that seems to be swaying the willingness of the CC to accept the SWAC (and Public Works) site recommendations.
At yesterday’s SWAC meeting, a dissenting committee member and neighbor to the Beaverton Valley site floated a motion for SWAC to retract its site recommendation to the County Council. No other member of SWAC was willing to change their site recommendation in spite of the recent flurry of online letters.
- The Sutton Road site offers very little flexibility for the future, even if it can be made into an adequate site for the present. This decision is not just for this year, or five years from now, but for 20 years and 40 years from now (and probably for 100 years from now, although I find it difficult to even imagine the island 100 years from now).
At yesterday’s SWAC meeting, the county provided a new table of trash volumes at all of its solid waste facilities in the past 5-10 years, and the rapid population growth of the past decade is reflected in an enormous increase in the amount of garbage, recycling, and hazardous waste that is handled at our facility. There is no reason to believe that this increase in both people on the island and their garbage will be curtailed any time soon. Garbage is a growth industry here.
The Sutton Road site offers little to no buffer on at least two sides, including numerous small lots in the Hillview Terrace neighborhood and Roche Harbor Road. SWAC determined rather early in this siting process that buffers to neighboring properties was one of its highest priorities. A number of other priorities were established at the same, fairly well-attended public meeting early in the site-selection process, where perhaps 30-50 members of the public put colored dots on some big charts indicating personal priorities for many aspects of a new facility. There is no evidence that either the late-on-the-scene batch of letter writers or the CC has checked to see what the community decided at that meeting were important community values to be considered in the planning process.
The county has already invested $850,000 through the Land Bank this decade in purchasing a large portion of Al Sundstrom’s farm just across Roche Harbor Road from the town property which is presently hosting the solid waste facility. To expand that facility, whether now or 20 years from now, compromises the very agricultural vistas (including the dark and uncluttered night views) which the county intentionally preserved when the Land Bank purchased that property (a result of the most letters that they had received on behalf of any one site at the time of purchase).
Some readers will remember that I studied very carefully the 2003 plans for expansion of the solid waste facility at the Sutton Road site. I pointed out at that time, when a very specific set of plans was being considered for a conditional use permit, and I will remind now, with no actual current plans drawn up for that property, that there seems not to be sufficient room on either the town-owned parcel or the adjacent county-owned “Sundstrom Parcel” at the corner of Sutton Road, for a stormwater pond that can meet the state requirements. The limitation is topographical – on these steeply sloping properties, which then also slope to the south, there is just nowhere to put a stormwater pond that is large enough to meet DOE requirements, if very much of either parcel is developed. The stormwater pond drawn into the plans in 2003 was not large enough then (as admitted in the engineer’s report) to meet the requirement even for the first phase of development of the site (which included only half of the planned facility and did not include the possible pads for building waste or green waste that have been penciled lightly onto the 2008-09 site plans). If there had been room to expand the stormwater pond, surely, rather than ask for a variance to DOE regulations, an adequately-large pond would have been drawn onto the plans in 2003.
We can not read the future (most of us certainly did not see the present economic meltdown coming). It is impossible to know what our solid waste needs will be even ten years from now. The “fancy new incinerator” that operated for a decade on the town site until the mid 1990s was closed down by changing regulations even before it was paid for. The Sutton Road site offers few options for the future.
- In spite of the size of the town parcel, the Sutton Road site likely offers the least useable space for expansion and choice of this property could easily translate into the mandatory pick-up option in the near-future. At the best-attended public meeting during the site selection process, an angry public let SWAC and Public Works know that they did not want to sacrifice self-haul of garbage in planning for a new facility. However, throughout the siting process, it has been made clear to SWAC that choice of a smaller-footprint facility includes imposing mandatory pick-up on San Juan Island residents, so that the amount of car traffic at the facility can be greatly reduced. Choice of a site with few expansion options will likely lead the county to go the mandatory pick-up route when space gets tight. It has been made very clear that putting in a system of on-site roads for safely hosting all of us in our cars at the transfer station is one of the biggest space-hogging aspects of the plan.
- The Beaverton Valley and Daniel Lane properties have much more useable land and offer the opportunity for pretty good screening in most directions. If Public Works chooses to be a good neighbor (which it certainly has not been at the Sutton Road site, as indicated by DOE’s most recent list of problems at our solid waste transfer station, as well as ongoing problematic interactions with adjacent neighborhoods for many years) a pleasant, inoffensive, and largely invisible solid waste facility could be placed on either of these sites. Any revised facility at the Sutton Road location will be as close to and as little-buffered as it is now to many adjacent neighbors in Hillview Terrace, and will be much more open than it is now, to Roche Harbor Road and the Land Bank Vistas across that road, and to the hundreds of cars that daily travel Sutton Road (on a third side) to their homes beyond the town site.
- In order to use the Sutton Road site, the county will almost certainly have to rezone a 6-acre parcel of Agricultural Resource Land that it acquired from the Sundstrom family in 2002 or 2003. While this may not seem so dire, it is how this came to be that threatens every parcel in the county. In 2002-3, when the county discovered uncapped garbage on part of the town Sutton Road parcel and Public Works was eager to start digging for their Trash to Treasures project and thus needed to relocate their already-finished plans, they created and acquired a new 6-acre “Sundstrom parcel” along Sutton Road “in lieu of condemnation,” which means that they would have condemned the parcel, had not the property owner agreed to sell it. That parcel was part of a working farm, probably since before the turn of the century. Yet the word now on the street is that the soils can be tested and if they are not “ag. soils” then it can be reclassified to make it suitable for the solid waste facility (presently prohibited on Agricultural Resource Lands).
Why is this a bad road to go down? Because nearly every farm has bits and pieces that are not agricultural soils and are not part of the active farming operation (but Al Sundstrom stored rocks on the portion of his farm that the county acquired, for decades, keeping the rocks out of his useful pasture areas, and moved them only the week that the county took ownership). To reclassify this parcel, knowing its history and how it came to be separated from the farm that it belonged to until some time in 2002-3, is to make many, many of the present designations in the county soft and open to possible redesignation in the future. The county planners have frequently said that there are not enough RGU (Rural General Use) parcels for future needs of our burgeoning population: redesignation of that cute corner near you could be next.
- All but two of the SWAC committee members (those two live adjacent to the Beaverton Valley property) expressed concern about disturbing land adjacent to the old San Juan Island landfill, which is capped (but not completely, as was discovered in 2002-03), and which is not lined. Land which links this old landfill to the largest wetland in the county (the Town parcel and the county-owned “Sundstrom parcel”) must be substantially disturbed and excavated in order to build a new facility. The SWAC members presumably read everything available to them about the sites before making their recommendation. As a professional biologist, I believe that the undisturbed land between the covered landfill and the wetland below it is providing for no charge what have come to be called “nature’s services,” serving as a sponge to absorb whatever might be coming off the retired landfill. Such services are usually quite expensive to replace using manmade structures to do the same job, and which could be necessary with the high level of disturbance necessary to reconfigure the solid waste transfer station at that site. Although the Beaverton Valley Road site and the Sutton Road site both drain into the same huge wetland system, only the Sutton Road site has a retired, unlined, and incompletely-capped landfill perched immediately above it.
We already know that the landfill is leaking vinyl chloride, and additional monitoring wells have been dug around the landfill to watch for changes in this or other contaminants leaching out of the landfill. Why, if we didn’t have to do it, would we mess with that fragile ecosystem, balanced over a very important wetland, which drains directly into eelgrass beds in Beaverton Cove, in the struggling Puget Sound, only about a mile away? There is also some risk of having to remove (new) structures over time to deal with the vinyl chloride, if it increases. Googling ‘vinyl chloride’ rapidly introduces the reader to a long trail of old landfills, health hazards, and contamination of ground water. There is no reason to believe that the vinyl chloride story on San Juan Island will be any different, given enough time.
I would like to digress here for just a moment to introduce you to some of the avenues that have been explored by SWAC over the past two years and that led ultimately to their site recommendation. A consultant-engineer discussed one day many wide-ranging possibilities and one of them (which has been done elsewhere) was to mine the old landfill for recyclable materials, which she stated might be something like 40% (?) of the volume. No one seemed much interested at the time – this is a very expensive choice, but I mention it to let you know that the discussion leading to the SWAC recommendation was very broad in nature and is perhaps not particularly well-represented by the fairly short and concise summary that the committee submitted to the County Council.
- Some have argued that it is too bad to choose a site that is naturally “incompatible” with a new solid waste facility, assuming that such a garbage facility would trash the site, by its very nature. For one thing, it is hoped that a new facility would not be awful and unsightly, although that remains to be seem. But all of the sites considered by the SWAC, except the problematically-zoned Sutton Road parcels, were in fact zoned correctly (Rural General Use) to accommodate a solid waste facility. A site near Egg Lake was dropped from consideration by SWAC, partly because it seemed a shame to defile a property so near the interesting lakes and wetlands in that neighborhood (although its present owner has recently clearcut much of the property, taking it some distance down that road without any county collaboration).
I say to this that unfortunately, any site here with RGU designation is probably fated to be ruined over the long run, and it is only a question of whether the county ruins it, or another user, as RGU zonation seems to be pretty much a death sentence for the natural values of any piece of property on this island over time.
It is disingenuous for people living near the Beaverton Valley site to say that there was not a solid waste facility there when they bought their properties, or that they “didn’t know” about the possibility, as surely they discovered or were told at the time of purchase, that the large “Olerin” parcel was zoned RGU. That property has been considered time and again for a solid waste facility, airport, or other non-natural projects over the past 20 years. One vocal neighbor opposing the SWAC decision even gained new RGU status for their own nearby parcel in 2007.
- In spite of claims by various citizens or CC members that one site will be more or less expensive to develop than the others, there is not yet sufficient information about site plans to determine the cost and all seem to be in the same ballpark (especially when amortized over 20-40 years), according to the EIS. The county is going to have to put a substantial amount of money into the Sutton Road site in the next couple of months because of problems enumerated by the state Department of Ecology. Sadly, money spent correcting problems now at the Sutton Road site is unlikely to contribute to any sort of new site located there, since no plans drawn for this site use the present configuration (and if that configuration had much of a future, we would not be looking for a better solution).
- I am not happy about the way the county acquired the Beaverton Valley site in 2004 or 2005. It seemed dishonest and sneaky and overpriced. I did not volunteer to be considered for the SWAC during the site selection process because I have lived on this island for over 30 years and did not want to make a decision that would surely affect the happiness of people I know who live near each of the sites under consideration. I have been convinced, however, that the Beaverton Valley site is the best alternative for a solid waste transfer station on this island to serve the community for the next several decades, also known as "forever."
Claudia Mills
San Juan Island
|
