Override Aftermath: Doing Nothing To Landfill Is Not An Option

Wayne Attridge, director of health for Marblehead, said Wednesday that the town is "moving ahead" after losing the override vote to build a new transfer station on Tuesday. He is trying to determine what "downsized" options it has to cap the troubled landfill and keep the transfer station open.

"Doing nothing is not an option," he said.

Voters defeated the proposal that would have raised $22.23 million in debt to build a new landfill transfer station and cap the existing trash on the site at the northern end of town. The measure was defeated by an almost two-to-one vote – 1,956 votes for, 3,875 votes against.

The voters also rejected, by a vote of 2,424 to 3,372, a proposal to raise $706,961 for on-going monitoring of the landfill site.

Following the vote, Attridge said he spent the day meeting with his engineers and looking at available funds to continue work at the landfill. All design work on the proposed transfer station was halted, but his department will continue to conduct assessments to determine levels of pollution at the site, he said. The assessments are already funded.

Attridge said he will meet with the Board of Health next week to present options for what the town can do with the landfill with existing funds.

"We are looking at all the downsized opportunities," he said.

The priority is to cap the landfill or face some "nasty" fines -- up to $600,000 a year -- from the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, he said. But Attridge described DEP's enforcement as "fluid," and as long as the town continues to assess the contamination of both town-owned and privately owned property at the landfill site, he did not expect DEP to levy the fines against Marblehead.

What he wants to avoid is capping the trash and "closing the doors" of the landfill, he said.

Closing the doors of the landfill would mean that curb-side trash pickup would continue, but the service would be more expensive because it would require an additional truck. Instead of depositing the trash at the transfer station and then taking it to a facility in Saugus, the trash would be trucked directly to Saugus, he said.

If the landfill is closed, all other landfill services, including disposing of yard waste, would have to be contracted privately at the resident's expense, he said. "But we not there yet," he said.

He expects the board of health will appoint a building committee to review all options for the landfill and transfer station.

He said the health board members were "dismayed" and "disappointed" at the vote against the landfill measures. But they are experienced enough with Marblehead politics not to be shocked. "It's definitely a message," he said.

He said he was personally optimistic that the landfill vote would pass until 8 p.m. last night, when the polls closed.

"I give the electorate all the credit," he said. Marblehead voters have been very supportive of maintaining its infrastructure, but "if the electorate is slightly uneasy or overwhelmed, they will vote no on everything."

He believes that the voters were asked to approve too many items at one time.

The landfill site, created 75 years ago, when it was on the outskirts of town, is now highly regulated by the state. "We can't put a shovel in the ground without a permit from DEP," Attridge said last month.

There are no health issues posed by the site, although the site is contaminated, he said.

In the past the site had open pit burning and incinerated its own trash, spewing ash over the property, until the federal Clean Air Act of 1975 put an end to that practice, Attridge said.

Today, the trash is sorted at the 17.5-acre landfill site, most of which is owned by the town. The trash that cannot be recycled is hauled away by truck to a Saugus facility for incineration.  The recyclable trash is sold.