ALBANY COUNTY — Hilltown garbage needs a home.

The Rapp Road landfill, in the Pine Bush, where the city of Albany’s landfill is located, has been the towns’ receptacle since 1988. The four Hilltowns, the village of Altamont, and the towns of New Scotland and Guilderland all pay a tipping fee to the city in order to use the landfill in the Pine Bush. The city sparked controversy recently when it said that it would have to take back some of the land that it had dedicated to the Pine Bush Preserve so that it can extend the life of the landfill.
"We have an acre creep," said Lynne Jackson, a spokesperson for Save The Pine Bush, an advocacy group. When Albany’s mayor, Gerald Jennings, first made the proposal he said it would be 10 acres, then it became 12, and now it’s 12.6, she said.
"The people in town have fought hard for the preserve," said Guilderland councilman Paul Pastore at Tuesday’s town board meeting as he voted with the rest of the board against supporting the expansion.

Guilderland, which is the only municipality in the Enterprise coverage area that has land in the Pine Bush, is the only municipality that is taking a strong stance against the proposal.
"This is a stopgap solution," said Supervisor Ken Runion. The proposal is to take 12.6 acres of land from the Pine Bush Preserve and add it to the bordering landfill. The expansion will add another eight years of use to the landfill on top of the four remaining years it has left now, Berne Supervisor Kevin Crosier told The Enterprise last week.

The Berne Town Board voted unanimously last week to support Jennings in the expansion with some reluctance from board members. The board discussed but could not come up with a better alternative.
"I support what the city is doing," Westerlo’s supervisor, Richard Rapp, told The Enterprise this week. Westerlo uses the landfill and Rapp estimated that the town spends between $115,000 and $120,000 a year in tipping fees.

The town of Rensselaerville, which also uses the landfill, estimated its cost at $48,000 to $50,000 a year for garbage disposal. Supervisor Jost Nickelsberg said that the board didn’t know enough about the issue to comment.

Assemblyman John McEneny told The Enterprise this week that all but one of the 12 member municipalities of the Solid Waste Planning Unit that use the Rapp Road landfill signed Jennings letter of support. Guilderland is the only municipality that did not.

Since plans for the city’s next proposed landfill, which is in Coeymans, has stalled because residents oppose it and wetlands were recently discovered in the area, it is unclear where the towns’ garbage will go.
"There’s no magic bullet," said Jackson. "Garbage is a multi-faceted issue."
She talked about a long-term approach, including re-using things like bottles, which would reduce the amount of garbage going into the landfill. "It seems to me, there’s a lot of stuff we could re-use," she said.
She mentioned food "composting on a municipal scale," similar to the lawn-clippings composting system that she applauded the city of Albany for already having; this would also reduce the volume of garbage going into the landfill.
"The alternative is to look for another regional landfill site," said Runion at Tuesday’s meeting, looking at the immediate problem.
"I have mixed feelings," said Alexander Gordon, a Knox resident and Albany County legislator. "It’s a difficult situation for the towns." Like Jackson, he offered some long term possibilities for reducing the size of landfills.

He said that the town of Colonie got a contractor to establish a methane recovery system at its landfill. He expects that the system will bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars to the town over time.
The acreage that the city of Albany is proposing to add to the landfill is in Karner East, which "the preserve commission says is an irreplaceable piece of the best," said Jackson. She stressed that this was some of the most pristine land in the preserve.
"Dedication is a legal act, like forever wild," said Christopher Hawver, executive director of the Pine Bush Preserve Commission. "It’s the Pine Bush’s version of forever wild."

— Jarrett Carroll provided information from the June 20 Guilderland Town Board Meeting.