Marine Transfer Station
I am a resident of the Gracie Point and Yorkville neighborhoods and a member of both Asphalt Green and Sane Trash Solutions. I have benefited personally from the parks where the City intends to build the Marine Transfer Station, losing over 40 pounds by running along the East River Esplanade and through regular exercise as a member of the Asphalt Green Triathlon Team so that I am no longer clinically overweight. Asphalt Green provides a healthy and safe recreation for the youth and adults in New York City, even producing Olympians. A residential neighborhood, let alone a fitness center and children's play field is no place for a garbage dump.
The death of an Upper East Side resident Tuesday morning after being struck by a city Sanitation truck at First Avenue and 92nd street was the type of tragedy our city is working so hard to avoid. My thoughts and prayers are with the victim of this tragic collision as well as her friends and family.
Unfortunately, the administration's plan to build a Marine Transfer Station -- the only such facility in a residential neighborhood -- will bring many more trucks through this dense area and make it all too likely for tragedy to repeat itself. Garbage trucks and residential neighborhoods don't mix and we must stop hundreds of trucks from driving through residential side streets that are already dangerous.
Building state-of-the-art marine transfer stations, with the extra step of cranes putting containers onto barges, has become very expensive. The total construction cost for these stations is approaching $1 billion.
"The day the Solid Waste Management Plan was passed in 2006 it was already obsolete," says Council Member Ben Kallos, who represents the neighborhoods around the 91st Street MTS.
He has joined a long line of local politicians that have taken up the cause. In a March 25 preliminary budget hearing at City Hall, he grilled DSNY Commissioner Kathryn Garcia over rising construction costs.
