Landfill closure proposal goes to Hampden council Dumping could end by 2010; Casella agreeable to draft plan

HAMPDEN – The fate of Pine Tree Landfill has been debated for months, if not years, and on Tuesday night, councilors will consider a plan that proposes closing the entire facility by 2010.

Town and landfill officials have drafted a five-page closure plan that states the landfill will limit the variety of waste it accepts by mid-2007 and no longer will accept waste after Dec. 31, 2009.

Councilors will meet next Tuesday to discuss the plan, but a closure order must come from the state Department of Environmental Protection, which is aware of the plan.

“This is no done deal; this is an idea that needs to be fleshed out,” Susan Lessard, town manager, said Wednesday. “This is us trying to find closure for the residents of this community.”

Lessard said she has been working with Casella Waste Systems Inc., the company that owns the landfill, and the DEP to formulate a plan outlining a firm closure date of the waste facility, which has operated for more than 30 years.

“We have told Susan that if this entire concept does come to be that we will absolutely honor it and go along with it,” Don Meagher, manager of planning and development for Casella, said Wednesday. “We are in agreement with it and willing to follow the approach.”

In November 2005, Casella submitted a public benefit application to the DEP aimed to increase capacity at the 6 million-cubic-yard landfill by nearly 50 percent, but after four months without a decision, the company withdrew the application. Since then, DEP officials confirmed that Casella knew its application was going to be denied before it was withdrawn.

The state’s purchase of the Juniper Ridge Landfill in Old Town, operated by Casella, changed the face of Maine’s solid waste disposal, Paula Clark, director of the Division of Solid Waste at the DEP said Wednesday.

The draft decision denial indicated Maine had adequate capacity to dispose of waste generated in Maine without granting increased capacity at the Hampden facility. Clark said she thought the initial negative decision prompted the company to rethink the future of the facility.

Casella officials said the state’s ownership of the Old Town landfill affected their decisions.

“Our plans for this facility prior to the Juniper Ridge Landfill were very different than those after,” Meagher said.

The Vermont-based company sees value in the closure plan, Meagher indicated.

“This will give a lot of people in Hampden what they’ve been asking for, for a long time,” the Casella official said. “Finality and a period of time to start to adjust their budget without host community [monies].”

In 2001, Hampden and Casella officials negotiated the host community benefit, which includes a fee paid to the town monthly based on the tons accepted to the facility. Between mid-January 2002 and the end of March 2006, the town had received approximately $2.8 million for hosting the landfill. The town has set aside 50 percent of those funds to help pay for consultant engineers who will continue to monitor the landfill, even once it closes.

The proposed plan would shut the doors to the facility by the end of 2010, and the last load of waste would be hauled through the gates on Dec. 31, 2009. After June 2007, however, no waste except for incinerator ash and construction and demolition debris would be accepted at the facility.

The change would eliminate those wastes that have odor potential, such as sludge and bypass waste, Meagher said.

The agreement to allow construction and demolition debris to enter the facility until 2009 allows Casella the transition time necessary to build a construction and demolition processing plant at a now-undetermined site. When named operator of the state-owned Juniper Ridge, Casella agreed to provide the Georgia-Pacific mill in Old Town with 100,000 tons of construction and demolition debris per year to fuel the mill’s biomass boiler.

But because of the mill’s closing and state biomass burning regulations, Casella has disposed most of the construction and demolition debris, which primarily originates from other states, at Pine Tree. The additional time outlined in the closure plan would give the company more than three years to build its processing plant. The plan also strictly notes, however, that if the plant isn’t built by the end of 2009, there will be no time extension.

“We are willing to take on that risk,” Meagher said. “Understanding this is a significant risk on our part, we’re prepared to make the hard and fast commitment by a date certain.”

Although the Pine Tree facility is close to reaching its capacity, closure procedures usually result in design changes that provide more room to dispose of trash. In sloping the side of the landfill, which is done to avoid water runoff and erosion, it could provide an additional 800,000 tons of available space, Lessard said. These design changes do not increase the height or width of the landfill.

This point concerns Bill Lippincott, chairman of the Hampden Citizens Coalition, which has opposed increasing capacity at the landfill.

“I like the idea of final closure, but I have some concerns, and those need to be addressed before we [the coalition] come out with support [for the plan],” Lippincott said Wednesday.

Even though the council will consider the plan, decisions ultimately are left up to the DEP.

“If it is a proposal that the town is in support of, that obviously makes it more appealing to us [than] if that wasn’t the case,” the DEP official said. “It would be something we would carefully scrutinize if the town is behind it.”