BY LINCOLN ANDERSON | Although it’s been hard to get any confirmation from the de Blasio administration, word is that the solid-waste marine transfer plant planned for Gansevoort Peninsula is, in fact, going to happen.
Councilmember Corey Johnson recently told The Villager, “It’s moving forward — but there’s a long timeline. They need to remove the trucks, which will happen this coming December or January.
“I’ve spoken with Sanitation Commissioner Garcia,” he said. “They are moving ahead with this. But they want to talk to the community about it.”
Under the scheme, up to 60 garbage trucks per day will haul recyclables to Gansevoort, where they will dump their loads into barges, which will then ferry the waste to a new recycling plant in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. About 1.36 acres of the 8-acre peninsula will be set aside for a 25-foot-wide road for the trucks that will ramp up to the new transfer station. The Gansevoort facility will also have an “educational component,” teaching about recycling.
The trucks Johnson referred to are the Department of Sanitation garbage vehicles that currently park in an old garage on the peninsula, which is a remnant of landfilled shoreline between Gansevoort and Little W. 12th Sts. on the Hudson waterfront. These trucks will be relocated to the new three-Sanitation district garage as soon as it’s completed at Spring and Washington Sts. around the end of this year.
There will then be a period of 18 months to two years during which the old garage on Gansevoort is demolished and the peninsula also undergoes remediation for toxic chemicals. The site used to be home to a city garbage incinerator sporting tall twin smokestacks, the latter which were razed at least a decade ago.
“Then they need to build the facility,” Johnson said, referring to the marine waste-transfer station.
Still to be worked out is a key memorandum of understanding, or M.O.U., between the city and state to allow the project to go forward. Basically, because part of Hudson River Park will need to be “alienated” — or removed — from public park use for the transfer station, it’s been agreed that the Hudson River Park Trust should be compensated for the loss. The figure cited is $50 million.
However, Assemblymember Deborah Glick — whose district, like Johnson’s, includes the peninsula — said no M.O.U. is currently written, and none has ever physically existed. To hear her tell it, the major sticking point is that the state feels the city should pay the entire amount of the money since it has always been the city — first under Mayor Bloomberg, who conceived the plan, and now under Mayor de Blasio — that has been pushing for the marine waste-transfer plant at Gansevoort.
Johnson said it was his understanding that the city and state would each pay $25 million.
Either way, it’s always been said that the resistance to signing the M.O.U. has come from the state. Hudson River Park is on land that was once partly state- and partly city-owned, and the Trust is a state-city authority.
“This is a long way off,” Johnson said of the Gansevoort transfer station. “There’s going to be a lot of discussion over the next two years.”
The Village waterfront facility is just a part of the larger citywide Solid Waste Management Plan, or “SWAMP,” conceived by Bloomberg.
Of course, as part of the process, there must be planning of how the rest of Gansevoort apart from the garbage transfer station will be redeveloped into park as part of the 5-mile-long Hudson River Park. The Trust is only at the very beginning stages of that process — but again, there is time.
Farther south, in Hudson Square, the community unsuccessfully fought to block the new “mega-garage” at Spring and Washington Sts. Phil Mouquinho, of P.J. Charlton restaurant, has been the community’s point person on that project.
UPS will have the building’s ground floor, he noted, and there will be trucks from Sanitation Districts 1, 2 and 5 on the upper floors. The District 1 and 5 trucks will both use West St. (the West Side Highway) when going to and from the garage and Community Boards 1 and 5, he said, while the District 2 trucks are supposed to go out along Spring St. and up Hudson St. and Sixth Ave. when servicing the Community Board 2 district.
