An Unanswered Recycling Challenge
As if it weren't bad enough that the East Hampton Town Board has been studiously avoiding any mention of the town's two dormant landfills, the public is now being fed misleading information.
A Dec. 7 article in The New York Times's Long Island section dished out inaccurate details about what could be the most important decision the board will have to make in this decade - whether to permanently seal the landfills, mine them, or undertake some combination of the two.
As The Star has reported, consulting engineers have advised the Town Board of the projected cost of the three options - $50 million to mine both, $36 million to cap both, or $38.4 million to mine the Montauk landfill and cap the East Hampton one.
The consultants also have pointed out that other factors need to be considered, such as whether a stench will permeate surrounding neighborhoods, how much money may be recouped by selling mined recyclables and reclaiming the land they are removed from, whether toxic trash will be uncovered, and how much it will cost to monitor and maintain a landfill if it is capped.
The flow of information from Town Hall, unfortunately, stopped last spring at that point. Anticipating that the 1998 Town Board would make the final decision, The Star and the East Hampton Business Alliance tried to coax the candidates in this year's election to speak out on the subject, but to no avail. Offering vague observations about the importance and inevitability of a decision, instead they fretted over the widening-that-isn't of the airport's main runway.
In six months, the board must begin making a series of preliminary decisions, as the State Department of Environmental Conservation's required clock starts ticking, a task the town has managed to avoid for seven years. Now the incoming board members will have to bone up on the complicated financial and scientific data on which to base their opinions by June, which is not as far away as it seems.
Someone will have to step forward on Jan. 2, when the Town Board convenes for the new year, to purposefully take the reins on this issue. And who, we wonder, will be able lead the town's perpetually foundering recycling program toward some meaningful efficiency?