Reject the East 91st Street Marine Transfer Station

Dear Ms. Handell:

The proposed Marine Transfer Station (MTS) at 91st and York Avenue will destroy a neighborhood. I am asking your help to make sure this unwise project is not built.

The proposed MTS is an industrial garbage facility that does not belong in a residential neighborhood. It will be 10 stories high, almost 2 acres in size, and run six days a week, twenty-four hours a day. Up to 500 trucks a day will rumble up and down our local streets to dump garbage there. The access ramp will cut in half the beautiful Asphalt Green athletic facility where thousands of children play. All this will increase air pollution by at least 16%, increase noise levels that are already beyond legal limits, and irreparably harm the East River estuary, among other harms. I believe it will irreparably harm an area where New Yorkers gather along the riverfront, where residents of Spanish Harlem fish for bass and where a baby seal was spotted living among the rocky shoreline.

There are no other garbage facilities in the City located in a residential neighborhood. It is wrong to put one in ours.

This unnecessary facility will cost already-strapped NYC taxpayers a fortune. The City admits that the price tag has already soared from the $55 million projected originally to at least $245 million, and private estimates suggest that costs will be far higher.

One reason for this spiraling cost is that the proposed MTS is three times larger than is necessary for the Manhattan residential garbage it is supposedly designed to handle. Rather than wasting our tax dollars, City should be spending this money on after-school programs, teachers, police, and firefighters and others who improve our quality of life.

This destruction of a residential community is based on the false 'borough equity' premise that Manhattan's residential garbage is being shipped to other boroughs in New York City. In fact, much of Manhattan's residential trash is now is trucked in clean-air vehicles directly to a waste to energy plant in New Jersey, where the garbage is converted to much-needed electrical energy. That is a sane solution that preserves precious resources, and answers the City's borough equity argument: other boroughs will not be absorbing Manhattan's residential garbage that is disposed of in this way.

No one has looked carefully at this project for more than 6 years. Judges have deferred to the Department of Environmental Conservation, and the DEC has deferred to the Department of Sanitation based on unrealistic assumptions and outdated 2003 data.