Bloomberg’s Plan for Transfer Station Jeopardizes His Political Base
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Upper East Side residents fighting Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to reopen a garbage transfer station in their neighborhood say he wouldn’t do it if he lived there himself.
What makes it more aggravating to them is that the mayor would be living there if he had chosen to reside in Gracie Mansion, which stands just blocks from the marine transfer station at York Avenue and 91st Street. Rather than move into the mayoral residence, Mr. Bloomberg decided to stay in his townhouse on 79th Street near Fifth Avenue.
“My first suggestion to him is that he occupy Gracie Mansion,” Bernie Zuckerman, 73, said.
Mr. Zuckerman, who lives at East End Avenue, recalls vividly the atmosphere around the transfer station when it was still in operation. “The trucks would idle for hours,” he said. “On a hot summer day, between the trash and the gas, it was quite a time.”
Mr. Zuckerman voted for Mr. Bloomberg in 2001, he said, but the mayor might lose him this time around if the plant reopens its doors as planned.
Mr. Bloomberg’s position on the issue is a slap in the face to his base, the state senator whose district includes the trash-center site, Liz Krueger, said.
“I think that yes, over the last year and half or so, there’s definitely been more and more conversations I’ve had with constituents who are concerned with decisions the mayor is making,” the Democrat said. An uproar like the one over reopening the transfer station concerned Mr. Bloomberg’s push two years ago to close one of the neighborhood’s firehouses, Ms. Krueger said.
When Mr. Bloomberg took office, voters on the Upper East Side were loving their man in City Hall. Mr. Bloomberg won the neighborhood with two-thirds of the vote, even as he lost every other Assembly district in Manhattan, according to data from the Board of Elections.
Former fans have turned against the mayor, however, as word of his plans for the plant have spread, an anti-plant activist, Rosemarie Zanghellini of East 86th Street, said. He wants not only to renew garbage operations at 91st Street but to expand them. The upgraded plant would package commercial waste for transport by barge out of the city, in addition to the residential trash it handled before it closed in 2001.
According to the Department of Sanitation, the mayor wants to have some commercial waste handled on the Upper East Side in part because the city’s existing facilities for businesses’ trash are clustered in Brooklyn and Bronx neighborhoods. That’s not fair, an assistant commissioner at the Department of Sanitation, Harry Szarpanski, said.
“Yes, we are the Upper East Side,” Ms. Zanghellini said. “The politicians are trying to make this a racial and class issue, and I find it really disgusting. We should get cancer because they did that to other people?”
The residential neighborhood is no place for a trash plant’s stink, noise, and traffic, especially since the transfer station stands right behind a public sports facility, a York Avenue resident, Seymour Roth, 78, said.
Mr. Roth described his souring on the mayor by saying, “I voted for him last time, for the last time.”
The chief spokesman for the Sanitation Department, Vito Turso, acknowledged that the 91st Street facility is surrounded by more housing than are other trash facilities that the Bloomberg administration wants to build, reopen, or upgrade. Those, he said, are in neighborhoods zoned for a mix of uses, including commercial and industrial.
Mr. Szarpanski said the department wants the Upper East Side to know the new facility will generate less stink and traffic than the old one.
Trucks would line up only inside the plant’s fence, not on the street, and the actual dumping of their loads would happen inside the building and into containers that would be sealed before they’re placed on barges for transport. Before the plant was closed, the trucks deposited the trash directly onto open barges on the East River.
If the plant is reopened, noise might be more of a problem, Mr. Szarpanski conceded, because the private companies that collect commercial trash at night would be driving in and dropping it off after hours.
“There are many other neighborhoods bearing the burden right now of these trucks coming to their neighborhoods,” he said. “Frankly, a lot of those trucks are from Manhattan.”
How convenient, Ms. Zanghellini said. According to her theory, the mayor is actively courting her neighborhood’s enmity. It’s all part of his plan to win over the rest of the city, she reckoned, by committing an act of “environmental terrorism” against the Upper East Side: He’ll be able to tell the rest of the city he’s dumping trash near his own neighborhood.
“They don’t really trust him because he’s a millionaire,” she said of the city’s other residents. “This is a brilliant political move.”
The choice of site has also been attacked as a matter of political calculation by the speaker of the City Council, Gifford Miller. The transfer station site lies in his council district, but proposing that a trash facility be built in another neighborhood instead could prove an embarrassing position for Mr. Miller to take when he runs for mayor next year, as he has been preparing to do.
Hearings on the mayor’s plan for the network of marine transfer stations are expected to begin at the council early in the year.