Agenda - Council - 02/26/1985 - Laserfiche WebLink

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l:ebruary 13, 19B5 Mr. Paul Smith Metropolitan Council 300 Metro Square Building St. Paul, M~ 55101 .'/ Dear Mr. Smith, Please accept the following comments from the City of Burnsville on the Metropolitan Council's new "Solid Waste t~nagement Development Guide/Policy Plan". We apologize for the lateness of this submission. One area of concern is the Plan's provision for fairly immediate, mandatory local ordinances that would require source separation of identified recyclab!es and compostable yard-waste materials. We believe that it is too early to establish this preference for source separation over centralized separation. Moreover, the City of Burnsville is on record in support of an alternative position espoused by the Association of Metropolitan Municipalities (A~), the Municipal Caucus, and the Dakota County Legislative Committee. Essentially, these groups believe that it is preferable to first engage in sustained public education efforts and voluntary recycling programs such as the one now underway in St. Louis Park. If experience shows that this more moderate approach fails to sufficiently stem the flow of the waste stream into regional landfills, then perhaps we would support the more bureaucratic and governmentally intrusive course of action now proposed by the Metropolitan Council. A second area of concern arises out of our special status.as the host for two (2) operating landfills. In that regard, we endorse many of the points raised by the City of Ramsey in its memorandum of January 22, 1985 to the Metropolitan Council. We too believe that the presence of landfills within our community results in unrealized tax base, and the loss of economic opportunities. The "Plan", with its extension of the useful lives of landfills, only exacerbates this adverse impact. Furthermore, future landfill deposits under the "Plan" wil] be concentrated residues that will arguably increase the potential for environmental and human health hazards. Additionally, we agree with the City of Ramsey that the nature of landfills makes it impossible to assess them for a fair share of the cost of constructing nearby municipal improvements. This consequence is a particularly timely concern of the City of Burnsville as it struggles to induce quality development in the northern sector of the City that contains the two (2) existing landfills. For all of these reasons, it is regrettable that the "Plan" provides little discussion of the impacts to host communities of existing and future landfills.