There are few touchier issues on Staten Island than garbage.
So when Mayor Bloom-berg proposed soliciting companies to build a high-tech waste-to-energy plant last year, City Councilman James Oddo (R-SI) met with top mayoral aides to make it clear there would be an all-out war if the new plant were situated in Richmond County, where the reviled Fresh Kills landfill has been shut for a decade.
“I told them exactly how ugly it was going to get,” recalled Oddo. “The message never sunk in.”
When the administration released its possible plans last month, they included only one location: the Fresh Kills landfill.
From a practical point of view, it made sense. There aren’t many vacant seven-acre city-owned parcels sitting around surrounded by empty space. Technology has advanced to the point where 17 percent of the garbage generated in the United States is converted to energy at 89 facilities around the country, according to the city’s Independent Budget Office.
It was time for New York to get one.
The city exports 11,000 tons of waste a day at a cost of $300 million a year, or $94 a ton. Shipping costs are going up by about 7 percent a year. There’s a private waste-to-energy plant in New Jersey where the city sends 11 percent of its trash at a cost of $66 a ton.
The potential savings would be in the tens of millions each year if a similar plant were built here.
Politically, there was no way Fresh Kills would be accepted by elected officials on the island.
For 50 years, Staten Island was — literally — dumped on by the rest of the city, and residents go batty at the slightest possibility that the island might have to accept garbage again from the other boroughs.
In fact, the Fresh Kills plant would have converted only the island’s own waste. But given their decades-long experience, the borough’s elected officials and their constituents had a hard time believing that.
“This was doomed from the start,” admitted one city official.
Two weeks ago, Bloomberg went to Fresh Kills to examine the results of a pesky fire. Several elected officials were there to to corner him into a discussion about the garbage plant.
Two days later, the Sanitation Department yanked Fresh Kills as a potential site.
“I’m not sure he realized the insensitivity bringing this to Fresh Kills meant to the people of Staten Island,” said Councilman Vincent Ignizio.