Ginetta Candelario was disappointed by the results of last week's Holyoke City Council meeting, but not surprised. "The writing was on the wall," the city resident says.
On May 6, the Council failed to pass a proposed moratorium on new trash facilities in the city. The measure had been crafted specifically to address a controversial transfer station that United Waste Management hopes to build on Main Street in the Springdale neighborhood.
The driving force behind the moratorium was the neighborhood's long-time representative, Ward 2 Councilor Diosdado Lopez. He and other project opponents say the 22,575-square-foot facility—where municipal solid waste and construction and demolition waste would be dropped and consolidated, then sent to landfills—would bring too much traffic, noise, toxic exhaust and other pollution to an already overburdened neighborhood.
Scott Lemay, CEO of UWM, says there are a lot of misconceptions about the project, which he says would be cleanly operated and would provide local tax revenue and jobs. (See "Trash Talk," Feb. 21, 2008).
In October, the Council had unanimously passed an earlier version of the moratorium. But City Solicitor Karen Betournay quickly issued an opinion that the Council had failed to follow the proper protocol for changing city zoning laws, which the moratorium would have done, and that state law prohibits municipalities from banning a waste disposal facility on a site already zoned for that use, as is the proposed UWM site. On that advice, Mayor Mike Sullivan declined to sign off on the moratorium, effectively killing it.
In response, Lopez organized a public hearing, required for a zoning change, and agreed to whittle down his original call for a 12-month moratorium to four months. In the end, though, he only got eight votes—a majority of the 15-member Council, but not the two-thirds needed for it to pass.
Residents concerned about the project did get some good news last month, however, when the Council voted to require trash facilities to get a special permit from the city. That creates an opportunity for the public to weigh in on everything from traffic patterns to the facility's hours of operation, says Candelario, an organizer of a citizens group called Holyoke Organized to Protect the Environment (HOPE). Candelario is also a professor of sociology at Smith College, where her students have been studying the proposed project. "We have some concerns about& the political process itself," she says. "How do you create real community participation in this kind of process?"
In addition to issues like pollution and traffic, the project raises "social, cultural and economic issues that carry as much weight," Candelario notes. She questions why the project is targeted for Ward 2, a poor neighborhood with a large Spanish-speaking population and high asthma rates, where residents already live alongside numerous industries.
At-large Councilor Rebecca Lisi sees the transfer station as inevitable; the job now, she says, is to minimize any detrimental effects it could have on the neighborhood. That will be tough, she says, in part because UWM is not required to provide the city with an environmental report, which could help identify potential problems. Lisi also worries that, after months of fighting, some residents have grown weary. "I really hope they can become reinvigorated in the process," she says, "instead of just feeling like they lost, because there's a lot of need for public input and public advocacy. This is going to be a wearing battle."
