Community Corner

New Waste Agreement Coming Soon

Shared transfer station pact is up for renegotiation for the first time in 40 years.

Officials in Durham and Middlefield are negotiating a new agreement to allow the continued use by residents of both towns of a waste transfer station on Cherry Hill Road.

This year marks the first time in 40 years that the agreement has come up for renegotiation. Leaders in the two towns signed the pact in October of 1971 after residents at town meetings in each community approved the proposal for a shared waste facility. Under the terms of the agreement it must be renegotiated by this fall.

To meet that deadline, the two towns in the fall of 2010 formed a task force that is reviewing the agreement and will develop a new one, said Dominic DelVecchio, chairman of the Durham-Middlefield Interlocal Agreement Advisory Board. He said the task force should complete its work this spring and a new agreement could be in place by April.

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“We’re hoping to wrap it up soon,” he said.

The interlocal agreement calls for the two towns to oversee the transfer station, which sits on the Middlefield-Durham line, and share its costs proportionately. Under the agreement, DelVecchio said, Durham shoulders 65 percent of the transfer station’s costs and Middlefield carries 35 percent.

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The facility’s annual budget is currently about $800,000, he added.

Also later this year, the transfer station could begin taking so-called “e-waste,” or electronic waste, under a new state program designed to recycle such waste.

In 2007 Connecticut passed a law banning the disposal of electronic equipment, such as televisions, computers and monitors, in local landfills and transfer stations. It has developed an initiative whereby retailers can only sell equipment by makers who bare the cost of recycling the equipment.

DelVecchio said his agency has not yet implemented a local program because the state did not issue until this month a list of accepted vendors who will collect and take away electronic waste.

Now that the list is available, he added, the interlocal agreement board would begin interviewing vendors. He said the agency hopes to select a vendor in the coming months and may begin accepting e-waste by June.

The program, he said, is being done at no cost to the towns.

 

 

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