L.I. Town supervisors support State solid waste plan: Brach-Williams, others contact governor

Shelter Island Town Supervisor Amber Brach-Williams recently joined a group of other Long Island supervisors in writing letters to Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) urging her to support establishment of a Long Island Regional Solid Waste Management Plan.

Local lawmakers want to prevent the supervisors’ fear of what they described as a “solid waste disposal crisis affecting over three million residents of our towns.”

The lawmakers are trying to underscore to Albany the importance of Long Island’s four waste-to-energy facilities, located in Islip, Hempstead, Babylon and Huntington. According to a 2023 letter to the federal Environmental Protection Agency from Martin Bellew, president of the Islip Resource Recovery Agency, these facilities were built and began operations between 1989 and 1992, and all currently operate under long-term service agreements with municipalities and receive residential waste streams from nine of Long Island’s 13 towns.

“Collectively,” Mr. Bellew told the EPA, these facilities “provide Long Island’s only ‘on-Island’ disposal capability for 1.5 million of the more than 2.6 million tons of municipal solid waste generated here each year.”

“Solid Waste Management is going to become a very expensive issue for all of our communities and we need to work together to find regional solutions,” Ms. Brach-Williams told the Reporter. “Earlier this year, it was one of the first concerns that [Suffolk County Executive] Ed Romaine brought to all Town supervisors and relevant personnel together at a forum to understand the issues and discuss them. Working groups have been formed and continue meet to study paths forward and our Commissioner of Public Works Ken Lewis attends those sessions on behalf of the Town.”

Southold Town Supervisor Al Krupski’s letter to the governor noted that waste collected produces 970,000 megawatts of electricity for the region annually.

The idea for all Town supervisors to write to Ms. Hochul emerged from a meeting of the Suffolk County Supervisors Association a few months ago, Mr. Krupski said. They support an Aug. 19 letter to the governor from County Executive Romaine on the same topic. The letters were all sent together as one package at the end of September, Mr. Krupski added.

“All the supervisors are very concerned about this,” Mr. Krupski said in a recent interview. “I think 75% or 80% of the solid waste is shipped to the incinerators right now. They burn the garbage and generate electricity on Long Island. If New York State decides that these incinerators have to close, then we have to ship all the garbage off. They said it’d be another 180,000 trucks a year on the road. It’s a tremendous amount of garbage, so we’re trying to prevent that.”

The letters identify some immediate priority action issues for Gov. Hochul to address. The first item requests that public and private waste management facilities not be designated as “obligated entities” under the New York Cap and Invest Program, which is meant to encourage consumers, businesses and other entities to transition to low-carbon alternatives by applying a price on pollution.

The second item urges that the Long Island Power Authority should renew and provide long-term extensions of “Power Purchase” agreements with the four Long Island waste-to-energy (WTE) facilities, “with a rate not less than the average cost of purchased power paid by LIPA from all sources, escalating annually and preferably closer to the rate LIPA has agreed to pay for offshore wind energy.”

The letters’ final request calls for designation of the energy produced at WTEs statewide as a “renewable source, as it is by the federal government and in most other states. WTE facilities must be able to continue to sell their electricity to the grid post-2040.”

The letters conclude that failure to address these issues will only add to the already increasing costs of solid waste management — particularly for households — and will directly result in Town budgets that exceed the 2% cap on tax levy increases.

Finding ways to reduce the waste stream is one way of taking action immediately, Mr. Krupski said.

“We’re looking for more of a regional solution. We’re working on seeing if we can do a better job with food waste, which takes up about 20% of the waste stream, and do anything we can do locally so it doesn’t have to be shipped,” he said.