By Anthony Bottan
At the inaugural meeting of the Southwest Nassau County Villages earlier this month, that Mayor Mary Bossart and officials from the village attended, Malverne Trustee Joseph Hennessy explained that the garbage disposal contract with Covanta, a waste-to-energy company that takes the villages' garbage, is up in August 2009.
According to Hennessy, the Town of Hempstead's new offer to the villages, $85 a ton, would cost village residents roughly $10 more a month to dispose of their garbage. However, Hennessy said the town not only wants to charge residents more, but tack on an additional administrative fee to dispose of the garbage, even though the villages are within the Town of Hempstead. To avoid these additional costs, Covanta told the villages that it might be in their best interest to look for an alternative engineering firm to find a cheaper, and possibly environmentally safer, way to dispose of their garbage.
Town of Hempstead Spokeswoman Susan Trenkle said that though the villages have been in contact with the town, town officials are not in a position to make an offer to the villages because they are working out a contract with Covanta. Trenkle also said the price increase is incorrect and that town officials have not given any figures to the villages.
Vice President of Business Development for Covanta, John Waffenschmidt, said the company has been in discussions with town officials to extend their contract and hopes to reach a final agreement within the next six months.
Waffenschmidt could not comment on the exact dollar amount being discussed between the town and Covanta, but said, "the spirit of negotiation has been fair...and when the contract is finalized, it will be good, if not better from the view of the Town of Hempstead." He said Covanta officials have had discussions with the villages on what options each municipality has for garbage disposal. He said he feels it would be in the villages' best interest to go under the umbrella of the Town of Hempstead contract with Covanta. Despite that, he urged the villages to draft an RFP under the 120-W contract format, just to find out if there are any better and less expensive alternatives.
"In the long range, it will be the best value for the villages," Waffenschmidt said.
It was also rumored that Covanta was in the works to build a fourth burner. Some residents argued that it could have negative impacts on the environment and would cost the villages more money. According to Waffenschmidt, Covanta has interest in expanding and its Westbury plant was built with the potential to have a fourth burner. That decision will be up to the Town of Hempstead but at this time there is no contract in place to add a fourth burner.
Hennessy said when the Town of Hempstead signed a garbage disposal contract with American Refuel in 1988, all Nassau County villages were designated a set weight of garbage that the villages must bring there. However, once recycling became more prevalent, villages could not reach the designated garbage weights because items that could originally be dumped with regular garbage, such as newspapers and grass cuttings, now had to be separately disposed. Villages were then paying for garbage they weren't dumping and asked for an addendum to the contract, which Hennessy said they were not granted. That's still the contract that is in effect, and the one that villages are hoping to change.
Moving forward, villages must now seek their own deal for disposing of trash or remain under the Town of Hempstead's plan and wait until a new deal is finalized with Covanta.
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