Minutes - 20080318 - Transfer Station

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• 8 Commissioner Gordon said that she asked earlier to put freely offered parcels as preferred sites. Commissioner Carey said that this should go under technical criteria so that it can be given some weight. Bob Sallach agreed. Commissioner Gordon said that under land use, a site should be preferred if the land use is non-residential. Bob Sallach said that he would like to leave land use open at this point. He said that it could be made too exclusionary. Commissioner Gordon said that her suggestion should at least be written down and recorded. Chair Jacobs said that this should be listed under the items that were raised by County Commissioners for future consideration. Commissioner Gordon said that the site should not be in a residential area, and preferably in an industrial or commercial area. Bob Sallach then reviewed Exhibit 7, Meeting Timeline. The only change is that the decision for the exclusionary criteria is being moved to April 15th Chair Jacobs noted that the meeting listed on June 30th is an additional meeting for the Board of County Commissioners and not before a regular meeting. 5) Public Comment Period Yonni Chapman made reference to the public information sessions and said that it has been fairly evident that Olver has not always been able to present what they have to say even to the County Commissioners without confusing them. He said that he has attended public information sessions in the past related to the landfill, and he was extremely disappointed in the process, because the biggest majority of the time was taken up by trivial presentations and the discussion was minimal. He said that the presentation should be kept to a minimum and the discussion to a maximum. He said that what really bothered him was when Commissioner Nelson asked about the definition of environmental justice and the consultant responded that it would depend on the public information sessions. He said that this comes far too late in the process and the public needs to know about this particular criterion and exactly what the Board of County Commissioners is thinking about in terms of environmental justice. It needs to be up in the front at the forums so that there can be some substantive discussion. He said that this demonstrates a lack of understanding as to how to define environmental justice. He thinks that this should be asked of the experts (i.e., HRC, EPA, etc.). He finds this approach to be too little too late. Bob Nutter said that the waste will be taken from the transfer station out of Orange County. He hopes that a transfer station would be near a railroad, because he believes that this is the cheapest way to move large volumes of things. He said that the site where the landfill is now is near a railroad and this would be an ideal situation for a transfer station, and it would be cheaper to move the solid waste out of the County. Barry Katz said that, between all of the criteria, there are 25 areas and the Board is trying to optimize among 25 variables and then weight them. He said that this is almost impossible. He said that Planning Director Craig Benedict used to have maps of Orange County with different variables and colors and you could see what was happening around the County with these maps. He suggested looking at all of the technical criteria and almost all of the community-specific criteria, then the sites could be mapped out using the Planning Department's expertise. He said that this would be a quick way to see what is in and what is out. Regarding prevailing winds, he said that the Department of Environment and Natural Resources has all of the data about prevailing winds. 6) Further Comment and Feedback as desired by the Board to Olver, Inc. and/or County Management