By JOSEPH KELLARD
As a hard rain fell last Wednesday morning, some 50 Oceanside residents rallied outside the front gate of the Town of Hempstead landfill on Long Beach Road, claiming that offensive odors are coming from the ongoing work on its grounds.
Led by Nassau County Legislator Jeff Toback, protesters held signs that read "Quell the Smell," "Bench the Stench" and "Stop Dumping on Oceanside" as they dodged large puddles in the road. Police kept the road clear when garbage trucks from towns such as Malverne, Garden City and Commack entered and exited the facility.
Prohibited from taking dumped garbage since 1989, the facility since then has been permitted by the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) to serve as a recycling and transfer station for trash.
"There are days when there is garbage left here overnight, and that's what creates the odors," Toback said outside the landfill. "They're not able to control the smells. ... If the town can no longer prevent adversely affecting the Oceanside community, if they can't control what goes on here, they need to stop doing it."
Toback said he and other community leaders, including Michael Mulhern, an Oceanside resident and general manager of the Oceanside Cove apartment complex on nearby Daly Boulevard, have received more complaints lately from residents about offensive odors. Many of these residents opposed a zoning board application by Reico Properties, a recycler of construction materials, which seeks to build a facility in this area, which is populated by several similar businesses that they say already produce enough offensive odors, dust and loud noises.
"Oceanside has done its fair share [of accepting these types of facilities], and enough is enough," Toback said. "It's unfortunate that Oceanside is known as 'the place with the dump.' We want to take that stigma away from us and close this facility once and for all."
In a statement realeased on June 4, Toback said, "While some residents say the smell may be attributable to decaying grass clippings and other landscape debris, some residents wonder if there is other noxious material being dumped at the site."
"I'm here to get the dump closed, because you don't know what's in the waste," said Larry Cohen, a resident of Oceanside Cove. "I've been living at the Cove for four years and [have] been experiencing the obnoxious smells for a better part of those four years."
Darlene Sperico, an resident of the Ocean Lea section of Oceanside, west of Lawson Boulevard, is one resident who believes the area has enough waste and recycling facilities. "I understand industry," Spercio said. "They have a right to open up companies. We have a new batting range, a skating facility and a karate place on or near Lawson Boulevard. We're trying to make an industry where kids can go. But if you keep putting in polluting things, no one is going to want to go to these places, and I think it's unfair to taxpayers."
Toback believes that the town has the capacity at other facilities, perhaps at its Merrick landfill, to serve as a transfer station, and said he will ask the town to look into this possibility.
In response to the comments and requests of the protesters, Town of Hempstead spokesperson Mike Deery released a statement that said: "[The] call for the closing of the Oceanside Dump is a cynical and shameless attempt, by lawmakers seeking re-election, to mislead residents as to the current status of this facility."
The release went on to claim that when the dump closed 14 years ago, the town began converting trash to energy in a public and private relationship, and that the remaining waste had been delivered to the American Ref-Fuel facility, near Stewart Avenue and the Meadowbrook Parkway, which has supplied millions of watts of power to the local electrical grid.
The town said that while permits allow the transfer of many types of waste, the Department of Sanitation has limited transfer activities at this site, which is regularly inspected by the DEC, to landscaping debris (yard waste) and some discarded appliances.
To demonstrate the facility's success in not adversely affecting the community, the statement cited "the minuscule number of complaints" the town receives about its Oceanside facility, and that "the rotten eggs" odor residents complain of cannot be produced significantly by yard waste and is probably generated by other nearby recycling facilities.
"Our engineers have informed us that local county sewage transmission stations could also be a source of this odor," the statement read. It concluded, "Cessation of operations at any of our facilities would disrupt the town's waste flow and recycling efforts, sending costs skyrocketing while producing no benefits for the community."
Toback vowed that the rally was the first of many to come, and said that hundreds of people would have protested if not for the heavy rain. "We're going to continue to come down here and continue to be active and make our point of view known until we get some results," Toback said. "We're going to try and do it again in the very near future."
