Landfill plan viewed as 'step in right direction'

Landfill plan viewed as 'step in right direction'



By DOUGLAS JORDAN
Special to The Record
Publication Date: 05/11/08

One of Lincolnville's strongest critics of the city's failed attempt to return landfill waste to her neighborhood sees the city's proposed remedy as a "step in the right direction," but she's not quite ready to embrace it.

"I just need to be comfortable that the solution that the city and the DEP (state Department of Environmental Protection) has come up with is right for Lincolnville and for West St. Augustine," said Judith Seraphin after an information session the city hosted late last week.

At that session, St. Augustine chief of operations John Regan presented the Final Consent Order for Holmes Boulevard and Riberia Street Properties, which he said "should be good news" to the residents of Lincolnville, where the Riberia site is.

The explosive political issue is nearing an end with the city's agreement to move the waste to a landfill in Nassau County.

The issue started when community activists learned that the city had taken waste from an old landfill on Riberia Street in Lincolnville and dumped it into a pit off Holmes Boulevard. When the state DEP learned of this, it fined the city and ordered it to clean up that site.

The city then planned to return the landfill waste to the Riberia Street site after cleaning it up. That proposal called for topping it off with clean topsoil and making it a bird-watching site. Neighbors and others objected and after a series of public meetings, the city came up with the Nassau County solution.

The meeting last week was to give citizens an update, which included a lot of technical information from the DEP.

Dwight Hines, a retired college professor who is now a political activist in St. Augustine, questioned the validity of the data.

"These are misleading numbers," Hines said. "Therefore, the results are not accurate."

Hines also he wondered if the city may have already secretly dumped some of the material in other locations.

Mike Fitzsimmons, DEP Northeast District Waste Program administrator, said that regardless of the numbers, all of the material will be removed to Nassau County under the plan.

Another Lincolnville resident, Missy Hall, expressed some suspicion about the plan.

"It's not that it's not good news," she said. "I just want to make sure the city follows through with it. Lincolnville very often has been neglected by the city."

During the question-and-answer portion of the meeting, Hall asked each representative of the DEP to stand up and explain their role.

"If it's such good news, then why did it take seven or eight people from the DEP to deliver it?" she said. "I'm skeptical that it's been resolved. It doesn't seem to me to be as simple as the city would like us to believe. There is a lot of technical information involved in this."

As for Seraphin, she doing more research to understand the technical issues better.

"I'm asking questions and getting answers, but I haven't gotten satisfactory answers to some of those questions," she said. "When I get those answers, I'll decide if I'm comfortable with this."

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