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REPORTING FROM CONCORD MONITOR
"Co-Op Drops Landfill
Plan" by Elizabeth Walters, 8/3/06, p. A1
A contentious plan to install a landfill in a bend of the Merrimack River
in Canterbury is dead, at least for now: The trash cooperative that wanted to build it has withdrawn its application.
The Concord Regional Solid Waste/Resource Recovery Cooperative announced its decision in a news release yesterday, citing
the recent extension of the co-op's contract to burn its trash at the Wheelabrator incinerator in Penacook. The co-op has
also abandoned an application to shore up a part of the riverbank that threatens its access road.
"In the near term,
the cooperative will focus its efforts on the permitting and expansion of the ash landfill in Franklin, which is under way,"
the co-op's director, Jim Presher, said in the press release.
According to the co-op's website, the ash landfill's latest
expansion will provide room until 2009.
For die-hard landfill opponents, the announcement was a shock.
"I'm totally
speechless," said John Bouton, the chairman of the steering committee for the Oxbow Initiative, a group that formed to oppose
the landfill. Oxbow made its case to co-op towns' conservation commissions this spring, and it was also responsible for an
anti-landfill petition that has garnered 4,000 signatures.
"I think that there is really going to be a continuing
need for vigilance relative to the river,"Bouton said after he recovered, "and we are eager to be part of the solution to
our solid waste problems down the road."
The co-op, which serves 27 towns and cities in the capital region, bought
the land in 1999 and filed a landfill application with the state Department of Environmental Services 18 months ago, prompting
an outcry from residents who feared the effects the landfill could have on the river.
Since then, its selectmen estimated,
the town of Canterbury has spent more than $40,000 arguing that the site was unsuitable. Thirteen of the member towns'conservation
commissions have voiced their disapproval of the plan, and two other towns voted against it at town meeting. It has inspired
more than 45 letters to the Monitor.
Critics argued that the site was unstable and vulnerable to erosion, and that
the landfill would threaten nearby conservation lands and a river the state had spent more than $200 million cleaning up.
"It's clear that this is not the site for a regional landfill," Bouton said yesterday.
Co-op officials argued
that the landfill would not threaten the river and was an economic necessity. The co-op has burned its trash for energy at
Wheelabrator since the plant was built in 1989, but Jim Presher, the co-op's director, said rate increases after the expiration
of the current contract would make burning unfeasible.
The contract had been set to expire in 2009, but last week,
the co-op and Wheelabrator agreed to continue burning at least through 2014 and possibly through 2018, a deal that had been
in the works since representatives of each member town approved it last year. The extension convinced the co-op's operating
committee that the landfill application was "no longer timely," the press release said.
At the Department of Environmental
Services, the documents the co-op submitted for its landfill permit application measured more than 18 inches high. Several
of those inches had to do with the river's possible effects on the landfill and vice versa. Throughout its application, the
co-op's engineering firm, CMA Engineers, maintained that the rate of erosion on the riverbanks was about 0.1 feet a year and
that the site would not be threatened by the river for hundreds of years. Aries Engineering, a firm hired by Canterbury, said
erosion could range from 0.1 to 11 feet a year. In a rebuttal, CMA maintained the original rates, but in the press release,
Presher said surveyors found a considerable amount of new erosion last spring near the co-op's access road, on the south side
of the parcel.
"It had moved almost 9 feet to the east since they last surveyed the property in February of this
year," said Bob Steenson, who is the co-op's Canterbury representative, a member of the co-op operating committee and a Canterbury
selectman.
When the co-op applied last spring for a permit to try to stop erosion on that section of riverbank, Presher
was careful to point out that the erosion was from a seam of groundwater, not the river, and it threatened the access road,
not the area where the landfill would stand. But Steenson said yesterday that the co-op found that the land north of the original
area of concern also would need erosion control, leading to further expenses and permit applications.
"The co-op
realized that the plan they had to stabilize the riverbank would not solve the problem," he said.
In its press release,
the co-op left open the possibility of future riverbank stabilization - and another landfill application for the same site.
"This also allows time to evaluate long-term slope stabilization programs for the Canterbury access road, with wetlands
and solid waste facility permit applications to be reconfigured and re-filed at an appropriate future date, depending on the
circumstances," Presher said in the press release.
"Now, also, the co-op has the opportunity to begin to look at
alternatives and to perform the kind of site search they should have done in the first place,"Steenson said.
Presher
could not be reached for further comment yesterday.
The co-op's announcement was applauded in Canterbury, whose selectmen
had declared the town's opposition to the landfill after reading the Aries report.
"The withdrawal of the two permit
applications by the co-op is a great victory for a tremendous natural resource, the Merrimack River, the citizens and communities
downstream and all those throughout New Hampshire who treasure our environment," the selectmen said. "This was a worthwhile
effort and money well spent."
The landfill was partially what inspired Canterbury voters to adopt a pay-as-you-throw
trash system at town meeting this year, and the selectmen said they hoped other co-op communities would look at reducing their
own waste loads.
The co-op's press release shared a similar sentiment, saying the co-op was looking at ways to increase
recycling.
Bouton said the landfill fight might not be over.
"I wouldn't call this dead," he said. "I would call this
pending. But it's certainly exciting, because it buys all of us time to continue to raise public awareness of our solid waste
problem."
"Now what we have to do is figure out much better ways to manage our trash, like recycling and other technologies,"
said Oxbow's spokeswoman, Patricia Bass.
Although Oxbow no longer has to focus on its original mission, Bouton and Bass
said they think the organization still has a role to play in the coming years. Its members have learned a lot about waste
disposal, and they hope Oxbow will be able to participate in a dialogue within the co-op and even statewide about improving
waste disposal methods, reducing trash tonnage and increasing recycling.
As for the proposed landfill site, the co-op
did not reveal its immediate plans yesterday. But Bouton has a suggestion for the parcel, which sits south of the Gold Star
Sold Farm conservation area and north of the Riverland conservation area: buy the land from the co-op and make that a conservation
area, too.
"Landfill Foes Fight Carefully" by Elizabeth Walters, 7/31/06, p. A1
In the year and a half since
the Concord area trash cooperative announced plans to build a landfill next to the Merrimack River in Canterbury, the group
that formed to protest the project has been methodically building the ranks of opponents whose towns are served by the co-op.
So far, 4,000 residents of the 27 co-op communities have signed an anti-landfill petition organized by the Oxbow Initiative.
Thirteen conservation commissions have declared their opposition to the landfill, most of them after meeting with Oxbow members.
Three other towns passed anti-landfill resolutions at their town meetings.
The goal of the Oxbow Initiative's two main
projects - gathering petition signatures and making the case against the landfill to the member towns' conservation commissions
- is to inform the public about the project and convince people that the site is not suitable for a landfill. Because the
co-op is governed by representatives appointed by each town, Oxbow members ultimately hope its communities will tell the co-op
to change its plans.
"I think the hardest thing for all of us to remember is that we are the co-op," said John Bouton,
the chairman of Oxbow's steering committee. "If the public were to raise its voice against the landfill site, this ill-wrought
proposal could rot from within."
The Concord Regional Solid Waste/Resource Recovery Cooperative bought 295 acres in a
bend of the Merrimack near Interstate 93 in 1999. In winter 2005, it said that it planned to stop burning trash at the Wheelabrator
incinerator in Penacook and build a landfill on 69.5 acres on the Canterbury site. If the co-op gets the needed state and
federal permits, dumping there could start in 2015.
The announcement sparked an outcry in Canterbury, which less than
a year before had voted to spend $800,000 on a project to conserve the Gold Star Sod Farm, just north of the landfill property.
After a series of informal meetings among residents, the Oxbow Initiative was born. The group has a steering committee of
about 10 people and an e-mail list that is growing, along with the petition signatures, Bouton said.
In the months just
after the co-op's announcement, much of the opposition consisted of Canterbury residents, even though the landfill site is
closer to parts of downtown Boscawen and Penacook than it is to Canterbury's town center. Oxbow decided to take its argument
to towns beyond Canterbury, Bouton said. "It felt imperative for us to reinforce that this is not about Canterbury, but about
the river," he said.
Last fall, the group started the petition, and it has been collecting signatures ever since. Members
have gone anywhere they can find a gathering of people - rummage sales, town meetings, the State House sidewalk, Market Days.
Last spring, Oxbow decided it wanted to take the dialogue to the officials of each member town. Bouton and Patricia Bass,
the group's spokeswoman, decided to talk to the conservation commissions, which serve as advisers to other town boards in
environmental matters. In their presentation, Oxbow members outlined their arguments against the landfill - that the riverbanks
along the site are unstable and subject to erosion and that the plan threatens a river the state spent decades and millions
of dollars restoring to good health.
"It was very easy to get conservation commissions to see the inherent dangers in
siting a landfill along a river that you spent hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up," Bouton said. "They got that intuitively
and they got that intellectually."
At the end of the presentation, Bouton and Bass asked the commission to send a letter
opposing the landfill to their selectmen, to the governor and to the Department of Environmental Services, which is reviewing
the main landfill permit application.
"Ideally, the selectboard would agree with them and would instruct its representative
to the co-op to advise the co-op to seek another site for the landfill," Bass said.
Typically, after a visit from Oxbow,
a conservation commission met with a co-op official before finalizing its stance on the issue, Bass said. As of last week,
the conservation commissions that had gone on record against the landfill after the visits were those in Allenstown, Bow,
Bristol, Concord, Deering, Gilmanton, Hillsboro, Hopkinton, Loudon and Salisbury. Dunbarton, Tilton and Northfield sent the
state letters of opposition before Oxbow even met with them, Bass said. And the residents of Boscawen, Canterbury and Webster
went on record against the project with votes at town meeting.
Of the other member communities, most were in the process
of deciding their opinion, Bass said.Oxbow hasn't met with Henniker yet but plans to in August. In Weare, the group presented
directly to the select board, which is waiting to meet with the co-op. The conservation commissions in Hill and Pembroke declined
to meet with Oxbow, but Pembroke is planning to schedule a public forum with both Oxbow and the co-op.
In the towns where
the conservation commissions oppose the landfill, Oxbow is waiting to see whether the selectmen will also line up against
it. Those boards may prove a harder sell than the conservation commissions; in Concord, the city council sent the conservation
commission's letter to city staff to be analyzed before they act on it. The council also declined the Canterbury selectmen's
request to make a presentation on the matter.
Public opinion in Concord is especially important to Oxbow. The co-op representatives'
votes are weighted by town population, and Concord is the co-op's largest city. It also is the co-op's biggest trash producer;
according to totals on the co-op's website, in the last six months, Concord has produced three times the trash of any other
member community. At Market Days, Oxbow gathered 137 signatures on a petition for Concord residents to ask the council to
hold a public hearing about the landfill.
Regardless of whether Oxbow's efforts influence the co-op's decisions, members
are hoping to influence the Department of Environmental Services's decision on the landfill permit through the public hearings
it will have to hold, Bouton said. The hearings have not been scheduled yet, but notice is expected within the next few months.
In Oxbow members' experience, the group has already achieved its goal of getting people talking.
"There is a real
groundswell of support for new ways to think about our trash," Bouton said. "This landfill, if it's done nothing else good,
has raised people's awareness of the problem of solid waste and really, really, through the threat of putting it on the river,
caused us all to think about what alternatives we might pursue to minimize the need for such an operation."
-----OP/ED
EXCERPT ON FLOODING AND GROWTH-----
"The weather is getting stranger, and the 2006 floods make the municipal trash cooperative's
plan to put its landfill on a peninsula in the Merrimack seem really arrogant. Who, after all, would have thought that little
Turkey and Rattlesnake brooks could have done such damage? Not the people who put the St. Paul's School library on the edge
of Turkey Pond or the investor who turned Mill Place West on North State Street into an apartment complex."
-- Excerpt
from "A Last Stand of Trees" by Ralph Jimenez, Editorial Page Editor, May 21, 2006
-----ARTICLE, May 13, 2006-----
"All
sides wrangle landfill facts:
Debate focuses on protecting Merrimack"
By ELIZABETH WALTERS
Monitor staff
May
13. 2006 8:00AM
It has been 15 months since the cooperative that handles trash disposal for the towns and cities of
central New Hampshire proposed building a landfill near the Merrimack River in Canterbury. As the co-op waits for the state
Department of Environmental Services to finish reviewing its landfill permit application, opponents of the project have been
working to get the word out about the proposal and collecting signatures against it.
Although the two sides are at
odds over whether the parcel the Concord Regional Solid Waste/Resource Recovery Cooperative owns on a bend in the river next
to Interstate 93 is an appropriate place to dispose of trash, both say the facts are on their side, and their ultimate goals
are the same.
"The one thing I don't want to do is devalue the $192 million the state has spent to clean up that river,"
said Bob Steenson, the chair of Canterbury's recycling committee and the town's alternate representative to the co-op board,
who opposes the plan.
"I wouldn't propose anything, or want to propose anything, that might harm the environment or
put those 27 communities in any kind of jeopardy," said Jim Presher, the co-op's director and the landfill project manager.
"We want to have absolutely no impact on the river."
The co-op has converted its trash into electricity via the Wheelabrator
incinerator in Penacook since 1989, sharing the power revenue with the private company. But after 2009, when the original
20-year contract between the co-op and Wheelabrator expires, the co-op won't get any revenue and disposal fees will increase,
making the waste-to-energy model too expensive, Presher said. Last year, the co-op's board voted to sign a contract for another
10 years, but either party can opt out after five years, which means the proposed landfill could be accepting trash as early
as 2014.
The co-op's total land parcel is 295 acres; the landfill would sit on 69.5 acres on the eastern end,
2,400 feet from the nearest house, 680 feet from the river and 300 feet from the highway, according to the permit application.
It would be double-lined and would have a system for containing leachate, the liquid that would come from the trash. The leachate
would ultimately be trucked to Franklin and processed at the Winnipesaukee River Basin water treatment plant. The property
would have a separate system for containing stormwater that fell outside the active landfill area. It would also have a gas
containment system to deal with noxious and odorous fumes.
The landfill would be built in four phases, the first of
which would include an access road running south from the site along the railroad bed to connect directly with Route 4 near
Exit 17. The total construction costs are estimated at $61 million, not accounting for inflation and other costs that might
drive the price up through the years, according to the permit application. The operating costs would be $2.6 million a year.
The closure costs, once the landfill reaches capacity approximately 20 years after it opens, would be $9.4 million, or $136,000
an acre. The cost of monitoring and maintaining the site for 30 years after it is capped would be $101,000 a year.
The
co-op examined 95 sites in its 27-community area when it was looking for a landfill site, and the Canterbury site proved to
be the best option, Presher said. In its application, engineers hired by the co-op to study the site say it does not pose
a threat to the river, and the river - or rather, its erosion rate - does not pose a threat to the landfill.
Opponents,
along with an engineer hired by the Canterbury Planning Board to review a study of the river's flow and erosion, disagree.
They say the erosion on the high, sandy banks to the north and south of the site is faster than the co-op's estimate of .1
foot a year and could be as high as 11 feet a year. While the landfill application proposes setting aside 80 acres near the
river as conservaiton land, critics point to the proximity to existing conservation areas -the Gold Star Sod Farm to the north,
the Riverland Conservation Area to the south, and farm fields under an easement across the river in Boscawen to the west -
as grounds for serious concern.
Even if, as the co-op asserts, the landfill's risk to the river is minimal, critics
say the Merrimack is just too precious to risk it.
"We're not opposed to landfilling, although most of us think that's
a real backward step," said Patricia Bass of Concord, an member of the steering committee for the Oxbow Initiative, which
formed to oppose the plan. "We're opposing this landfill at this site."
When the co-op's plans were first announced,
most of the opponents lived in Canterbury, something the Oxbow Initiative has been working to change. Of the 2,000 signatures
it has collected on a petition against the siting of the landfill, fewer than a sixth are from that town, said John Bouton,
the chairperson of the steering committee.
"Almost nobody refuses to sign the petition once they stop and look at the
picture, that really pretty picture that we have of the sandy banks of the river where the site is to be located," Bass said.
The
group has also made contact with the conservation commissions in each of the co-op's communities, and 11 are in the process
of drafting resolutions against the landfill, Bass said. In addition, three towns - Canterbury, Boscawen and Webster -voted
to voice their disapproval of the landfill at town meeting.
"I think that increasingly, people are seeing this as a
conservation, a land-protection and river-protection issue," Bass said.
New Hampshire Audubon has also come out publicly
against the issue, said Joel Harrington, its vice president for policy.
"One of the concerns is that it's adjacent
to, if not within, an important bird area," he said. "That's an international designation which means you have species that
are . . . either endangered or threatened species that use it as a habitat or as a stopping-off point."
Bald eagles
have been spotted near the site, and the Merrimack is an important route for waterfowl, he said. Audubon is also concerned
that the landfill could attract new species, such as gulls, vultures and starlings, that could have a negative effect on the
native animals.
In addition to bald eagles, the area has been home to the brook floater, a mussel the state considers
endangered, and the northern leopard frog, which is not on any threatened or endangered lists, but which is considered rare,
according to a letter from the New Hampshire National Heritage bureau included in the landfill's permit application.
In
the course of reviewing the application, DES has commissioned a third study of the river's flow and how it would affect the
site. That report is expected to be completed in mid-June, said Wayne Wheeler, a permitting engineer at DES. Once the department
looks it over and finds answers to any remaining questions, it will begin scheduling the public hearing required as part of
the permit process. Wheeler said DES is already getting letters, phone calls and e-mails from people with opinions on the
issue.
Meanwhile, the Oxbow Initiative has found an energetic helper in Rachel Eades, a Canterbury resident who has
made helping the group her senior project. Members will go to social gatherings and other public places in the hopes of getting
more petition signatures and handing out more information sheets, Bass said.
Unused to an advocacy role, the co-op,
which is considered a governmental entity, won't cut as high a profile, Presher said. But the organization will try to get
more attention to its side of the debate as well, perhaps through letters to the editor and also by giving board members information
to discuss with officials and residents in their towns.
------ End of article
REPORTING FROM WMUR NEWS 9
"N.H.
Trash Washes Up On Massachusetts Beach:
Debris Carried By Rivers Litters Plum Island"
POSTED: 4:31 pm EDT May
18, 2006
PLUM ISLAND, Mass. -- Some of the debris washed away by the floods in southern New Hampshire is now littering
the shoreline of Plum Island in Massachusetts.
Plum Island officials said that hundreds of truckloads of garbage have washed
up on shore. It's obvious where some of the trash came from. A recycling barrel half buried in wet sand has the name of the
town of Goffstown, N.H., etched on it.
"We had lots of garbage, plastic and bottles and just stuff I've never seen before
here," resident Eva Timothy said. "Usually, it's nice and clean."
Plum Island sits where the Merrimack River meets the
ocean. Beachcombers must now walk carefully to avoid the tons of trash that was carried down the Piscataquog and Merrimack
rivers.
Everything from commercial containers to milk jugs, medicine bottles and unopened beer cans washed ashore.
"We've
had 17 days of rain and 14 inches of water," said Scott Fisher, of Elliot, Maine. "This is the outcome of that."
The residential
and industrial trash goes on for miles. Officials said that it's not just an eyesore on a scenic beach. It's a potential health
and environmental hazard, as well.
With Memorial Day just around the corner, the beach is now officially closed. Town officials
will ask the National Guard to help them clean up this weekend.
Although the majority of the floating junk came from New
Hampshire, those in charge of Plum Island said it's their problem now.
"There was a barrel that washed down from Goffstown,"
Newbury Selectman Joe Story said. "It's right up there, so whoever needs that can come try to reclaim it."
The shore is
littered with more than New Hampshire trash. Officials said that sewer overflow from some Massachusetts towns also polluted
the river.
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