Expanding the Landfill, and the Debt

Albany Common Council hears argument to throw “good money after bad”

At last month’s meeting of the Albany Common Council, six legislators voted against an ordinance authorizing the city to borrow the money to pay for the second phase of the controversial expansion of Rapp Road landfill. In this instance, six votes were all that were needed to defeat the ordinance. But as even the expansion’s most vocal critic, Councilman Dominick Calsolaro, will admit, that minor victory was just a glitch in the process.

“The city has already been spending money from out of the general fund” to pay for the landfill’s expansion, he said. And if the council votes at the upcoming monthly meeting to sell the bonds to cover the costs of the expansion’s next phase, the money will go back into the general fund.

The holdouts from the last vote: Calsolaro, councilwomen Carolyn Fahey and Barbara Smith, as well as freshmen councilmen Anton Konev and Lester Freeman.

If the city were to stop funding the expansion of the landfill now, City Treasurer Kathy Sheehan told the council Monday, the landfill would be full in two years, and the city would be facing twice the amount of debt estimated to be accrued from the expansion.

Sheehan said that if the city were to stop the expansion now, after constructing phase one, which only expands the landfill’s lifetime for two years, it would be facing roughly $60 million in debt service. However, if the city moves forward with the total expansion, it would be facing only $40 million in debt.

And nearly half of that debt is due to the restoration costs for the Pine Bush—a restoration that must be paid for “regardless of if we move forward with the second phase or not,” Sheehan said.

“Once the expansion started, and it has started—the permit was approved, the city borrowed money last year to build the first phase of the expansion—from a ‘dollars and cents’ perspective, it doesn’t make sense to only expand for an additional two years of life, ” Sheehan said.

Sheehan also informed the council that, from the $11.6 million in annual revenue generated by the landfill, the city makes roughly $4 to $5 million. She stressed that all of her numbers are only estimates at this point, and are based on information that has been made available to her from DGS. It is difficult to track down exact costs and profits (as Calsolaro has pointed out for years), as the city doesn’t manage the landfill in an enterprise fund, and instead just directs the revenue into the general fund, and obscures costs in the budget.

The general fund can essentially be treated like a citywide slush fund.

Sheehan said, instead, that the city needs to use an enterprise fund for the landfill, “so that all of the revenue associated with that activity and all of the liability associated with that activity must be accounted for in that fund. So a municipality can’t just take five million out of 11 million in revenue. The municipality has to demonstrate that that is really excess money.”

“There’s an opportunity here to learn from the past, and do things differently going forward,” Sheehan said.

Those who support the expansion of the landfill argue that the city just can’t stand to losing that revenue stream.

“We are fortunate because we have this stream of revenue,” said Councilman John Rosenzweig. “And anyone who is going to vote against bonding has to explain how we are going to move forward without the revenue stream.”

The landfill revenue funds valuable city resources, he said.

“If we close the landfill, people on the council will need to stand up and state to the public what it is in services that they are willing to cut. Because to discuss one without the other is pointless,” he said.

Although Calsolaro assumes that the council will move forward with the bonding, he considers this most recent hitch to be a considerable victory.

“We were never told until this year that that shredder costs $1.2 million a year just to fuel it,” said Calsolaro. “Nobody ever told us that. Nobody ever told us that every two weeks they had to replace a timing chain or something that costs $7,000 to replace. They never gave us that information before as it regarded the landfill. So we are finally getting more information. We are finally getting information that I have been requesting for years and years and years. And now we are getting it. So, I didn’t win the war but I have been winning some of the battles, and some of the battles have been just getting the information.”

—Chet Hardin

chardin@metroland.net