On Wednesday, June 15, citizens, community activists and politicians gathered on the basketball court of Asphalt Green Park to rally against the Marine Transfer Station (MTS) that the Solid Waste Management Plan (SWMP, pronounced “swamp”) calls for locating on East 91st Street. Participants in the rally held up signs with slogans such as, “Fund classrooms/Not trash!” and “Don’t trash the park.” Many children attended, holding up signs of their own or running around on the Astroturf beside the court.
New York City produces about 25,000 tons of refuse every day. About half of it is generated by businesses, who pay for private companies to collect their waste. The rest of the garbage comes from residences served by the Department of Sanitation (DSNY). Until the closure of Staten Island's Fresh Kills landfill in 2001, DSNY trucks carried residential trash to marine transfer stations, where it was loaded onto barges and floated to Fresh Kills.
As the city began to shut down Fresh Kills in the late 1990s, more and more residential garbage was diverted from the barge system to private waste transfer stations, where companies collected trash from DSNY trucks and loaded it onto long-haul trucks that carted it out of the city.
Bloomberg's SWMP, approved in September 2006, lays out the city’s solid waste management plan through 2025, addressing the areas of Waste Prevention and Recycling, Long Term Export, and Commercial Waste. The proposed East 91st Street Marine Transfer Station is part of an effort in SWMP to get the city's waste off the roads and onto barges again, and to make each borough responsible for its own waste. The SWMP calls for a total of four Converted Marine Transfer Stations, the others being at North Shore in College Point, Queens; Hamilton Avenue in Sunset Park, Brooklyn and Bensonhurst in Southwest Brooklyn.
Is it a park?
East 91st was previously the site of an MTS from 1940 until its closing in 1999. Community members of the Upper East Side, many of whom have resided in the area since before the previous MTS closed and can recall its adverse effects, say that any densely-populated residential area is an inappropriate location for a waste station. In 2009, New York State Senator Liz Krueger posted a press release on the New York Senate website stating that the 91st Street location is the only of the four proposed sites where there is no commercial zone separating the facility from the closest residences.
The facility would be accessible by an entrance ramp bisecting the Asphalt Green complex, which some opponents of the facility argue, as a park, is subject to public doctrine. They challenged the city on this issue in court, claiming the MTS could not intrude on parkland without approval from the New York State Legislature. On June 7, the Appellate Division, First Department, upheld a lower court’s decision that Asphalt Green and Bobby Wagner Walk are not parkland, and therefore not subject to public trust doctrine.
The rally was held on Asphalt Green in part as a reaction to this ruling, with those in attendance arguing that the complex is in fact a park. Jennifer Ratner, community activist and one of the main rally organizers, mentioned to the crowd that in setting up for the event, the Asphalt Green staff had to ask youths playing a basketball pick-up game to leave.
