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Frederick County residents strongly oppose incinerator

Thursday, March 2, 2006

For more than 40 years, Bob Chance has lived 72 feet from the Reichs Ford Road landfill.

As a neighbor to the Frederick County-owned trash facility, Chance said he has endured the odor of garbage, excessive traffic and speeding along Reichs Ford Road. Chance now fears the county will build a trash incinerator, or what many in the business call a “waste-to-energy“ facility, in his backyard. That will only exacerbate an already difficult way of life, he argues.

“It’s pitiful,“ he said. “[County officials] want to protect the people but they’re not doing it. It’s a bummer.“

County commissioners unanimously agreed Feb. 9 to look at building an incinerator as the answer to the county’s long-time trash crisis.

Commissioners agreed to authorize the Northeast Maryland Waste Disposal Authority to develop a plan for a waste-to-energy incinerator, negotiate an agreement with a provider and present the contract to the board on or before Dec. 1.

The board’s decision is a result of recommendations made in a study released in October, by the authority and its consultant R.W. Beck, suggesting the county build such a facility.

For Chance and others in the county, an incinerator is not the way to go.

Led by Sally J. Sorbello of Frederick, concerned residents have been meeting and e-mailing commissioners to educate the public and the board on what they see as the financial and environmental repercussions of an incinerator.

On Monday, a small group of residents, local business owners and the president of the Washington, D.C.-based Institute For Local Self-Reliance, Neil Seldman, gathered at a restaurant in Frederick, to discuss concerns.

According to Seldman, fierce opposition from local communities successfully defeated the construction of 270 incinerator facilities nationwide.

“At this point, [building incinerators] is literally shooting craps,“ Seldman, whose organization promotes energy conservation in urban economic development, said.

Both Seldman and Sorbello believe the solution to the county’s waste problem is not an incinerator, but a huge expansion of a mandatory recycling program. They believe that burning waste for energy is inefficient since anticipated revenue falls well below the operating cost of the facility.

“We are at a very risky fork in the road, and the citizens of Frederick County need to understand the financial liabilities we will be facing if the foolish recommendations of the Beck report are followed,“ Sorbello said in an e-mail. “Let’s not wait until the county is forced into bankruptcy trying to pay off the bond to finance this incinerator. We have better things to do with our money, and much better ways to handle trash.“