Seattle Public Utilities is getting down to the finishing touches on a Solid Waste Facilities Master Plan, but there are some who think the city is going in the wrong direction.
The preferred plan is to tear down, rebuild and expand the Wallingford and South Park transfer stations for $30-$35 million a pop. Recycling would also be ramped up at the two facilities, which ties into Mayor Greg Nickels' mandate to hit a 60-percent-recycling goal, according to the city.
A third component of the plan calls for building a new intermodal facility where garbage trucks could dump their loads directly into containers on train cars, instead of the containers being trucked to a railroad spur.
That would be good news for the Wallingford community, according to Janet Stillman, executive director of the Wallingford Neighborhood Office and vice president of the Wallingford Community Council. "There won't be... garbage trucks going there," she said of the neighborhood transfer station. "That would make it even better for us."
But wait a minute, says controversial Fremont businesswoman Suzie Burke. Why not get rid of the north and south transfer stations, sell the land for a tidy profit and build a combination transfer station and intermodal facility in one place? she wonders.
Burke even has a spot in mind. "Why the hell couldn't we do it in Interbay?" she asked. The proposal came up for discussion at a Lake Union District Council meeting earlier this month, and Burke wasn't the only one championing the idea, according to neighborhood district coordinator Antoinette Meier.
Stillman said the idea hadn't come up before in Wallingford, though, and the community council has taken no official position. "We were all kind of surprised," she said.
However, the proposal was actually talked about - but ignored - two years ago, according to Burke. "The sad part is after spending two years on it ... truthfully they never considered building one state-of-the art facility," she said. "That facility needs to be on rail."
The ideal spot for the combined site would be on Port of Seattle property in Interbay, Burke added. She concedes that building the site on Port property doesn't mesh with a current wish-list plan to redevelop the so called North Bay property above Terminals 90 and 91 into a high-tech bio-science hub with possibly some residential development thrown into the mix.
However, Burke insisted, setting up an intermodal operation there would tie in with the Port's mission statement calling for the development of industrial, transportation-based facilities that could serve the needs of both the city and the county.
In addition, a single facility could take advantage of economies of scale and offset the cost of recycling, of which only 60 percent is covered by fees, Burke said. "This thing has a cash stream attached to it," she said of the single-facility scenario. "It actually pays for itself."
There is no way Burke's proposal is going to happen, according to Port spokesman Mick Shultz. "The possibilities that the Port of Seattle is looking at right now for North Bay do not include any kind of waste-handling facility at all," he said.
Besides, Shultz added, current plans for high-tech development in Interbay would be more compatible with the Magnolia and Queen Anne neighborhoods than a garbage operation.
Magnolia and Queen Anne neighborhood officials agree. Magnolia Community Club president Lindsay Brown questions the fairness of the idea anyway. "Magnolia has certainly done its part by hosting a 47-acre open burning dump for 30 years," she said via e-mail.
Interbay became a landfill in the early part of the 20th Century, and later became a burning dump, according to a King County history Web site. "And we continue to do our part helping the entire region handle its waste by hosting the West Point Sewage Treatment Plant on the shores of Discover Park," Brown added.
"We would be opposed to it," said Ellen Monrad, chair of the Queen Anne Community Council. "The only site large enough to turn the (garbage) trucks around is on Port property." Plus, she noted, such a proposal would require an unlikely agreement between two railroads.
That's a key sticking point, according to Henry Friedman, solid-waste-facilities planner for SPU. Interbay is exclusively Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad territory, but the only way to get to county landfills is on Union Pacific tracks, he explained.
Switching from one set of tracks to another is unlikely, Friedman said. "They have these pretty strict rules they stick by, and they aren't the easiest folks to work with," he said of the railroads.
That's not to say there aren't joint operating agreements between Union Pacific and Burlington Northern. One is currently in operation on Harbor Island, the likely site for an intermodal location, according to SPU's master plan. But that agreement was forged in the early 1900s, Friedman said.
Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad spokesman Gus Melones said there is also a joint operating agreement that allows Union Pacific to use Burlington Northern tracks on the Tacoma-to-Portland run.
But that agreement is also many, many years old, he said, firmly declining to comment on the possibilities of reaching a similar agreement for an Interbay facility. "We would have to review an official proposal," Melones said.
Friedman said the current preferred plan of revamping the transfer stations and building a new intermodal facility elsewhere was based on a very detailed economic analysis. "To some people, it may seem like a very good idea," he said of the Interbay proposal.
Friedman said he remains unconvinced. "I'm going to go with the economists who have studied the plan," he said.[[In-content Ad]]
