Entrance sign to the controversial Marine Transfer Station

Although Mayor Bloomberg overwhelmingly carried the East 90’s in the last election, he is not a popular man among the residents here when it comes to the issue of garbage. The neighborhood is up in arms over his plan to re-open a huge garbage transfer site on East 91st Street and the FDR Drive.

The station on the East River would take Manhattan’s trash and put it on barges for removal to out-of-state landfills. Five years after Bloomberg announced this proposal, residents are still perplexed that he has not responded to community opposition.

“It’s like he isn’t listening,” said Francisco Gomerez, a doorman at 530 East 91st Street, “People talk and talk, and he doesn’t care.”

“I think they’ve gone down a path and they feel they can’t change course, ” Gifford Miller, former City Council speaker and Bloomberg’s opponent in the 2005 Mayoral election, said in an email.

The city’s old Marine Transfer Station closed in 1999 after nearly 60 years of operation. Trash is currently trucked out of Manhattan, and the city intends to cut down on truck pollution and mileage by sending the garbage by barge instead. Residents fear that if the station is re-opened, hundreds of garbage trucks will pass through the neighborhood each week to dump trash at this collection site.

The entrance to the station is on a quiet, residential section of York Avenue, lined with mom and pop stores and sidewalk cafes. An access ramp runs between a playground and two soccer fields belonging to Asphalt Green, a not-for-profit sports complex that offers programs to approximately 600,000 members of the community.

Wilfredo Carrero, the superintendent of the nearby Gracie Gardens apartment complex, remembers the years when the transfer station was open: “ York Avenue was a lot busier. Garbage trucks were double parked all the way down to 89th Street. It was smelly, especially in summer time, and there were a lot more rats along the street.”

When Bloomberg announced his new waste proposal in the fall of 2004, he explained that Manhattan had to be responsible for its own garbage. Manhattan creates half of the city’s garbage but doesn’t have a transfer station for waste. The bulk of the city’s waste is trucked to transfer stations in the South Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens.

According to Tony Ard, the director of the Gracie Point Community Council, the principal community organization fighting the re-opening, Bloomberg pushed this plan for political reasons. “He’s pandering for votes in minority communities in the outer boroughs. It’s a political game, pure and simple. He needed to support this because it was perceived as a matter of environmental justice.” Bloomberg has stood firmly behind his plan, as have many local environmental groups, including The Natural Resources Defense Council and the New York League of Conservation Voters.

The Gracie Point Community Council has spearheaded the neighborhood’s opposition, filing environmental lawsuits and enlisting local politicians.

The group, which claims 5,000 subscribers and a $2 million war chest, organized a thousand-person protest rally at Asphalt Green in 2005 and bused hundreds of outraged residents to City Hall for the waste-plan hearings.

Tony Ard said that they had proposed cheaper alternative solutions like trucking the garbage to the Harlem River Rails and then exporting it by train. They also suggested remodeling what is now a pound for towed cars in the West 30’s into an alternative marine transfer station for Manhattan’s garbage.

Despite their efforts, the City Council overwhelmingly approved Bloomberg’s waste plan in July of 2006.

At this point, Gracie Point has three lawsuits in the State Supreme Courts. Two suits are challenging the Department of Environmental Conservation permits necessary for the construction of the Marine Transfer Station. The third claims that the station would intrude on the public parkland of Asphalt Green and the East River Esplanade – a violation of a New York State public trust doctrine. As neighborhood volunteer Sarah Gallagher says, “We hope to keep this in court long enough so it never happens.”

Failing that, they have the hope of legislation. In 2008, Assembly member Micah Z. Kellner proposed a law, originally drafted by Gracie Point, that would prohibit the construction of any solid-waste transfer site within 800 feet of public housing. The Stanley Isaacs Houses and the John Haynes Homes Tower are 300 feet away from the transfer station. His bill, reintroduced with a different name in 2009, is resting with the rules committee and has not yet been voted on.

Residents also hope that the city will never have the $100 million dollars needed for the transfer station construction.

As it stands, the project funding is now delayed until 2011. If there is a new administration, the next mayor has the power to initiate an amendment to the waste plan that would exclude the 91st Street station.

Although Gifford Miller admires the community’s crusade, he is not overly optimistic about their chances: “I think the community has done everything it could. Sometimes it’s true, you can’t fight City Hall.”

The former Marine Transfer Station