NY TIMES - METROPOLITAN DESK

City Seeks Land Upstate Where It Can Put Garbage

By KIRK JOHNSON (NYT) 694 words

''We want a landfill,'' the city's sanitation commissioner, John J. Doherty, said yesterday at a breakfast speech in Manhattan. ''The city definitely needs its own landfill.''

Mr. Doherty is not the first official to dream of a dump the city can call its own. Ever since New York's last landfill, at Fresh Kills on Staten Island, began closing down in the late 1990's, sanitation engineers have worried that the city was becoming vulnerable. Landfill owners and legislators in Pennsylvania and Virginia, where most of the waste was going, might suddenly cut New York off, the doomsayers warned, leaving it buried in its own rubbish. Eventually, they said, the city would need to take control of its garbage destiny.

But then the pressure seemed to fade. New out-of-state landfills opened, keeping disposal fees down.

At the same time, as the regional economy boomed, many upstate residents found little appeal in the idea of taking trash from the big city.

A lot of that has changed, Mr. Doherty told an audience of civic leaders, businesspeople and sanitation buffs at New York Law School. Landfill fees have recently begun going up, he said, and even worse problems -- outright restriction on interstate garbage shipments, for instance -- are perhaps not far in the future. Meanwhile, he added, the job of selling an upstate community on the idea of a partnership with the city has probably gotten easier because of the recession.

''In today's economy, landfills are a pocketbook issue,'' he said.

Mr. Doherty said later in an interview that Sanitation Department officials would be going out soon to start their search, though no timetable had been set.

A spokesman for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, Dan Gilbert, said that if the city proceeds with its plan, a formal application will be required that will include an environmental impact review.

Waste experts say that more than economics are behind the city's new push to have its own landfill. The department is devising a long-term disposal plan, a barge-transport system in which trash would be packed into sealed cargo containers at transfer stations in all five boroughs. This system would lend itself to an upstate solution, they say, far more than any system the city has ever had.

Under the new system of transfer stations, which is supposed to be completed by 2008, garbage, like most goods that are transported these days, would leave the city in sealed containers that could be put on trains, barges or trucks, allowing shipment at what city officials hope will be greatly reduced costs.

But perhaps most important, they say, a system of containers would allow negotiators to head off some of the objections that arose the last time the idea of an upstate landfill plan was raised, in the 1990's. Many of the communities approached then were worried less about the garbage than about the swarms of smoke-belching trucks that would clog their highways and change the nature of their towns.

''I think the pieces really fit together,'' said Benjamin Miller, a former Sanitation Department official who has written widely about the city's waste stream. ''Getting the stuff in containers makes it possible to put it on barges or trains, and that makes the transportation cost less and environmental impact less.''

Mr. Doherty said in his speech that rail connections would be the first requirement for a candidate community. Sites that would require delivery by truck would not even be considered, partly because trucks would be disruptive and harder for residents to accept, but also because they would have no appeal for the city because of the higher costs.