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Mr. Chairman and members of the Subcommittee, my
name is Joseph Lhota, and I am New York City’s Deputy Mayor for Operations.
Among my responsibilities is ensuring the environmentally safe and economically
sound management of the City’s municipal solid waste (MSW). I implemented
Mayor Giuliani’s plan to close the City’s last remaining municipal landfill
at Fresh Kills. On behalf of the Mayor, I appreciate the opportunity to testify
today on pending interstate waste measures – bills that could have a
profoundly adverse effect on the City’s day-to-day operations.
Mayor Giuliani and Governor Pataki agreed in 1996
to close Fresh Kills landfill by December 31, 2001, and this decision was the
City’s first step toward embarking on a new, environmentally sound course in
the management of its solid waste. It is important that the Subcommittee
recognize from the outset that the Giuliani Administration has shut down this
facility responsibly and appropriately, with due consideration for the states
and their communities that have chosen to accept the City’s MSW. On March 22nd
the City sent its last shipment of garbage to Fresh Kills, completing a
five-phase program, initiated in July of 1997, requiring that all its MSW be
disposed of in communities that expressly choose to accept it through valid,
legally-binding Host Community Agreements. Since this plan mandates that the
City only export to willing jurisdictions, the Giuliani administration does not
see a need for legislation to require New York City to do that which it already
requires of itself.
In exporting its residential waste, the City is
exercising nothing more than the right the Constitution extends to cities and
states nationwide – responsible, efficient, and environmentally-sound solid
waste management through heavily-regulated and highly competitive private sector
businesses. MSW shipments have long been upheld by the courts as a commodity in
interstate commerce, and over the years communities have relied on the certainty
these decisions provide for protecting long-term, free market plans to manage
solid waste. This is especially important in a landscape where the more rigorous
environmental protections required under Subtitle D of the Resource Conservation
and Recovery Act (RCRA) have compelled communities to close smaller landfills
for the alternative of larger, costlier, state-of-the-art, regional facilities
that comply with the law. In this context, the right to transport solid waste
across state lines complements the basic reality that different regions have
varying disposal capacities irrespective of state lines. Areas such as New York
City and Chicago, lacking adequate space for landfills and/or prohibited from
waste incineration, may be located closer to better and more cost-effective
facilities in other states. These facilities need the additional waste generated
elsewhere to pay for part of the increased cost of RCRA compliance.
Although the closure of Fresh Kills affects only
the City’s residential waste, the private market is as essential to the
management of that waste as it is to disposing of the City’s commercial waste.
For years the City’s businesses have relied on private haulers to export waste
from New York. For many communities and states, MSW disposable fees are an
important revenue stream. The City believes that each locality has the right to
accept or reject the disposal of solid waste – not by federal legislation, but
by locally decided Host Community Agreements.
The fact is that the City, in securing contracts
for waste disposal exclusively at Host Community Agreement sites, has furthered
a partnership that benefits importer and exporter alike. As the nation’s
largest and most densely-populated city of eight million people – comprised of
three islands and a peninsula – the ability to send waste to newer, more
advanced regional facilities located outside the City’s boundaries
acknowledges the very environmental, demographic, and geographical realities
that made closing Fresh Kills necessary. For those localities that have opted to
import our waste, the revenue generated through host fees, licensing fees, and
taxes has substantially enhanced the local economy, improved area
infrastructure, paid for school construction, paved roads, and assisted host
communities in meeting there own waste management needs. Clearly, there are many
other jurisdictions nationwide that share New York’s approach, since 42 states
import and 46 states and Washington, DC, export municipal solid waste.
For the City and the businesses it selects to
handle MSW disposal, certainty and the long-term security of waste management
arrangements are fundamental to making New York a viable place to live and work.
Once negotiated, any disruption to the contracts and agreements providing the
City’s waste disposal framework could interfere with its day-to-day
operations. This is why the City enthusiastically supports the importing
community’s right to negotiate a Host Community Agreement most suited to its
particular needs, and to spell out in detail all of the provisions that make
waste disposal from out-of-state acceptable to that locality. Conversely, the
City will rely on private sector bidding to select the most competitive price
for disposal. Once formally agreed to, however, these agreements and contracts
must be inviolate in order to preserve the mutual interests of both importers
and exporters.
In that regard, the City has not pre-determined
where its municipal solid waste will be disposed. Instead, it has put into place
measures that ensure each bidder has all of the requisite environmental permits,
along with a Host Community Agreement that verifies the receiving jurisdiction’s
approval of the disposal facility and its acceptance of the imported waste with
applicable fees. Furthermore, the existing authority that states have in
permitting solid waste facilities in accordance with their own regulatory
mandates, zoning ordinances, and land use provisions, suggests even less cause
for federal intervention through legislation to restrict exports.
In closing Fresh Kills landfill, the City looked
to the private sector and the competitive free market to shape the future
availability of disposal sites. In July of 1997, when the City began the first
phase of diverting waste from the landfill, The New York Times reported
that New Jersey and Connecticut officials were ready to welcome New York’s
waste because it made "good economic sense." Robert E. Wright,
president of the Connecticut Resource Recovery Authority, which oversees and is
part owner of that state’s incinerators, told the press, "I guess we
probably have a more favorable eye on New York than some more distant
states." Of some jurisdictions The Times reported further, "In
New Jersey, where counties have spent millions of dollars to build incinerators,
local officials generally are eager for any guaranteed flow of trash. If
anything, imported garbage at a plant like the Newark incinerator is more
desirable than the local trash because the city gets a 10 percent share of the
fee charged."
The City, the largest consumer market in the
nation, is not solely dependent on exporting MSW through private disposal
markets to close Fresh Kills. It currently runs one of the most ambitious
recycling programs in the nation, and is the only large city in America that
requires 100 percent of its households to recycle – including multi-family
dwelling residents – and recovers a higher percentage of household waste than
any other large city in the country. The Giuliani Administration plans to do
even more. In the recently adopted City budget, the Mayor has included over $12
million additional dollars for the ongoing expansion of the City’s recycling
programs, including new materials, increased education and outreach, furthering
compliance, new equipment for improving efficiency, increased enforcement, and
residential backyard composting. The City currently maintains a combined
residential and community recycling rate of 58.9 percent. Moreover, the Mayor’s
long-standing directive to all City agencies to reduce workplace waste and
establish accountability measures for waste reduction have further reduced daily
tonnage.
The City’s residents are huge consumers of
goods manufactured in and shipped from other states, and the waste generated by
packaging materials is significant. For that reason, the Mayor supports federal
legislation that would limit packaging or require manufacturers to use some
percentage of recycled content in packaging material. Such requirements would
have a tremendous – and measurable – effect on the quantity of exported
solid waste. Despite the City’s best waste reduction and recycling efforts,
however, the City will still need to dispose of a substantial amount of its
waste outside its boundaries. I am confident that the capacity, the market, and
the desire to accommodate the City’s waste at out-of-state disposal sites will
exist in the foreseeable future. To that end, the Giuliani administration has
successfully closed Fresh Kills by relying on free market, private sector
solutions predicated on the strength of Host Community Agreements.
On behalf of Mayor Giuliani, I thank the
Subcommittee, and underscore the City’s interest in addressing Congress’
concerns regarding the interstate transport of municipal solid waste.
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