Montgomery Council votes to keep trash incinerator, rejects landfilling option

By Kate Ryan

A divided Montgomery County Council voted 6-5 Tuesday in favor of a  plan that would keep the county’s trash incinerator open beyond 2031, when the current contract expires.

The incinerator, or Resource Recovery Facility (RRF), burns waste to generate electricity, but opponents say it will take hundreds of millions of dollares to upgrade the plant to current environmental standards. They had been pushing for a plan to shutter the incinerator and hauled the county’s trash to landfills out of state.

Montgomery County Council President Natali Fani-González voted in favor of the resolution Tuesday that would beyond 2031, when the current contract expires.

“I do want to vote to modernize the RRF,” she said. She was joined by council members Evan Glass, Sidney Katz, Shebra Evans, Kate Stewart and Dawn Luedtke, who also voted to keep the incinerator in Dickerson operating.

Council member Will Jawando, the county executive-elect, opposed keeping the facility open, along with council members Andrew Friedson, Kristin Mink, Laurie-Anne Sayles and Marilyn Balcombe.

Balcombe, whose district includes Dickerson, where the incinerator is located, said the area may be sparsely populated, but, “The health of those individuals are being negatively impacted by this facility.”

On the economics of the plan, Balcombe said, “We certainly shouldn’t be making any contractual commitments about the future of the facility,” without having a guaranteed cost estimate.

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The incinerator, operated by Reworld, has been cited by the state of Maryland for exceeding emissions limits in 2025. The latest estimates from the county’s own analysis state that modernizing the incinerator would cost $356 million, though county council staff also said in previous hearings that there were many “uncertainties” regarding future costs.

“I’m starting my afternoon a little bit disappointed by this morning’s 6-5 decision by the county council,” said County Executive Marc Elrich, who had sent the council a letter urging members to hold off on the vote.

Elrich said he’s long wanted to close the incinerator, and blamed Fani-González for rushing the vote.

Fani-González said she wants to keep the incinerator operating because the alternative of transporting tons of trash to landfills takes the ultimate disposal out of the hands of county officials. Shipping trash out of state, she said, allows jurisdictions that take the trash to “change their mind in a heartbeat,” leaving the county to scramble to find alternatives.

Council member Mink said she’d been looking into a variety of issues related to trash disposal, from the risks associated with burning trash against those involving landfills.

“There’s the environmental question, and there’s the cost question,” she said. “Both options are bad on both counts,” she said, citing the fact that even after trash is incinerated the ash must be disposed of.

Jawando, who will take office as county executive in next month, told his colleagues, “I’ve said for a long time, before I joined the council eight years ago that we need to close the incinerator, and I won’t change my position today.”

All council members, and Elrich, agreed that the county needs to come up with plans to reduce the waste generated by the county’s 1.2 million residents each year.

“Nothing that we decide today precludes future councils from adding new advanced waste processing and for us to really move forward on composting,” Stewart said before the vote.

Stewart also reminded her colleagues that the current incinerator “generates enough electricity to power 27,000 homes or charge 82,000 electric vehicles for one year.”

The vote is not, however, the end of the discussion on the cost and operations of trash disposal in Montgomery County. It’s a nonbinding resolution.

Once sworn in, Jawando and the next council will have the opportunity to vote on the details of the plan — or reverse the decision.

“This is an important decision,” Elrich said. “Given all the other financial pressures the county’s going to have, I think thinking about this carefully is really important.”

– As part of Maryland Matters’ content sharing agreement with WTOP, we feature this article from Kate Ryan. Click here for the WTOP News website.