A proposal to greatly expand the Edgartown transfer station heads back to the Martha’s Vineyard Commission next month for a continued public hearing, where commissioners hope to fill in some of the gaps in the $2.5 million plan.
The Martha’s Vineyard Refuse District, which operates the transfer station, plans to add a new road for residential traffic, a new dropoff area for residential trash and recycling, and a second garbage scale for vehicles and commercial use. The project would more than double the district’s current footprint of about seven acres.
The Edgartown planning board referred the project to the commission as a development of regional impact (DRI) last year. A public hearing opened in December and was set to continue next Thursday, but will now resume on Feb. 4.
Meanwhile, commission members, town residents and others have struggled to fully understand the proposal, which aims to reduce traffic congestion, but has lacked the details of a final plan. The large scale of the expansion has also raised questions about future plans for the district, which serves Edgartown, West Tisbury, Chilmark and Aquinnah.
Tisbury and Oak Bluffs withdrew from the district in 1993, while the original Edgartown transfer station was still in the planning stage.
The refuse district committee voted unanimously to approve the new project in July 2014, with a bare quorum of five out of eight members. District manager Donald Hatch said this week that the project was years in the making, and that the current proposal, developed by Environmental Partners just before the committee vote, was the end result of those discussions.
Several residents have since raised concerns related to noise, visibility and other issues, including the scope of the proposal and the general lack of details.
“There were just a lot of things that weren’t explained,” Paul Foley, DRI coordinator for the commission, told the Gazette this week. “It was kind of a combination of — is this a conceptual plan or is this the actual plan.” He added that it was hard to visualize the need to expand the district, which is often free of traffic at this time of year.
“Ideally we probably should have gone out and observed this during the summer,” he said.
Commissioners hope to see more details when the hearing resumes, including an updated site plan that shows the location of proposed berms and water retention areas, and areas of clear cutting. They have also asked for images showing similar operations elsewhere, and more information relating to vehicle use.
Meanwhile, there is ongoing speculation about the district’s future plans. At the hearing in December, Mr. Hatch said the new station would be able to handle waste from all six Island towns, but not all their commercial waste. But he has also maintained that the district has no future plans beyond the expansion.
“We are not adding buildings,” he said this week. “It’s just some roadways and making it a safer, more user-friendly environment.” Plans for the current station began in 1989, when the district included all six towns. The commission approved the plans in 1995, with significant opposition from the community. A major controversy flared up when the Federal Aviation Administration raised concerns about the risk of birds near the Martha’s Vineyard Airport. A revised plan was approved in 1997, and the station finally opened in 2001.
According to minutes from a commission land use planning subcommittee meeting held in October, the new station could allow for separate handling of construction materials and other waste, and for composting. But Mr. Hatch said this week that it would lack the space for composting, which would need to happen indoors so as not to attract birds. “We might accept that material and ship the material, but we don’t have room to handle the compost for the Island,” he said. Those facilities would also require a change in the district’s operating permit.
Opposition this time around has again focused on noise and visibility, which abutters say has been an ongoing problem. The size of the expansion drew expressions of shock from some abutters when the plan was revealed some time ago.
Environmental Partners, a Quincy consulting firm, played a major role in developing the current proposal. In 2008 and again in 2011, the four-town district hired the firm to look at re-consolidation of the six towns into one trash district, a topic that has emerged periodically over the years. The firm’s recommendations in 2011 are mirrored in the current proposal. Mr. Hatch has said repeatedly that consolidation is off the table. He added this week that a legislative change several years ago had relieved the two-town district in Oak Bluffs and Tisbury from direct oversight by the state Department of Environmental Protection, and the costly regulations that came with it. Without that financial incentive, he said, the two towns that operate on their own no longer had an interest in merging.
“Tisbury and Oak Bluffs walked away from the table,” he said.
The four-town district is still regulated by the DEP, with oversight deferred to the Edgartown board of health. The proposed expansion would not affect the station’s DEP permit, which allows up to 125 tons per day on average. Mr. Hatch said he did not expect the expansion to increase usage, only to improve safety and circulation.
But long-term plans for the station remain unclear.
“The reason why there is such a change is to deal with the traffic congestion that is most intense in the summer,” district committee member Megan Ottens-Sargent told the Gazette this week. “And the reason why it’s such a long, circular road is because yes, there is some long-term planning that would entail putting up another building.”
She said she had pressed for composting facilities to be part of the expansion, in light of a state ban on large volumes of food waste that went into effect in 2014.
“I would try to bring up composting and other innovations,” she said, “and basically was educated to the fact that we had to do this incrementally and we don’t really know what our plans are because of all these different balls that are in the air — whether it’s state mandates or whether all six Island towns would unify again.”
She added that she is in favor of a six-town district. “I would certainly welcome that,” she said. “And I’ve never heard anybody argue against it.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Hatch is still trying to iron out a procedural mishap that emerged this year.
All four member towns in 2014 and 2015 authorized the district to borrow up to $2.5 million to pay for the expansion. But those town meetings happened after a 45-day window as defined by the district agreement. West Tisbury, Chilmark and Aquinnah have since authorized the district to seek legislative action to affirm the votes, but Mr. Hatch said that could be a lengthy process. As a fallback, he said, the district may have to re-authorize the spending and send an article back to the towns in the spring.
Mr. Foley said the pending town votes were unlikely to delay the MVC process, since the commission could simply authorize the project subject to other approvals.
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