Agenda - Council - 05/31/1983 - Laserfiche WebLink

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i I I I I I i I I I '1 I I I I I I I I INTRODUCTION Like power plants, airports, highways and factories, waste facilities often cause undesirable effects on local communities. Impacts may include risk of air or water pollution, noise, increased traffic on local roads or taking land out of other, productive uses. Many negative impacts of waste facilities can be reduced through proper siting--for example, locating a new landfill where there is less risk of causing groundwater pollution. However, proper siting of waste facili- ties cannot usually eliminate all adverse impacts. Some environmental and public health risks remain regardless of where a facility may be located. In addition, benefits may accompany the development of power plants and .similar land uses, such as spin-off development, large property tax pay- ments or employment opportunities. However, landfills, for example, do not usually attract other development. If publicly owned, they produce no property tax revenue at all. If privately owned, they don't produce much property tax revenue because they don't involve use of much capital equipment. Moreover, waste facilities are usually of more benefit to a large geographic area that uses them than to the community that hosts them. This report examines the beneficial-and detrimental effects from waste facilities on host communities. The report does not intend to suggest a diminished effort to abate land disposal of solid waste because it rec'ommends compensation to the host community. Rather, it is hoped that this report will strengthen efforts to recycle and recover energy and materials from solid waste by highlighting the external costs of land disposal. Solid waste abatement has been hampered because landfills are less expensive than resource recovery. One reason the costs of land dis- posal are less expensive is that the current free market economic system does not include the external costs of landfills. The solid waste management system in the Metropolitan Area is undergoing a dramatic change as a consequence of state laws. The existing solid waste system can be characterized as almost exclusively privately owned and operated. Many of today's landfills were open dumps upgraded in the last 14 years to meet new environmental regulations. None of these land- fills have artificial liners or leachate collection systems, though many have extensive groundwater monitoring systems. Public awareness of environmental issues has caused many peop)e to take a second look at the way this Region handles its waste. This awareness has decreased the ability for anyone (private or public) to successfully locate a landfill in the Region in the last decade. Because solid waste landfill space in the Region was on the wane and no alternatives were in sight, the Minnesota Legislature required the seven metropolitan counties