The Ulster County Resource Recovery Agency is moving quickly on a plan to introduce a landfill to the county, and it seems more and more likely that Wawarsing will be the location.

Currently, Ulster’s trash is driven up to the Finger Lakes. But that facility’s future is up in the air, not least because the locals don’t want to live next to a landfill anymore.

That’s the problem, isn’t it? Nobody wants to live next to a landfill, but somebody’s got to.

The UCCRA is adamant that it’s not that bad. Landfills, they say, are not like they used to be. Much of the waste in new facilities is siphoned off by specialized facilities that recycle the recyclables, compost the organics, and reuse some industrial waste as fill, mulch, and concrete aggregate. Plus, they assure us, new landfills incorporate emerging technologies to convert some of that trash into green energy biomass.

This is probably all true, or at least true enough, but we are still talking about a large pile of the county’s waste daily trundled on a phalanx of trucks – and, after passing through the reclamation pipeline, it’s the waste that even the people who collect waste for a living don’t want.

In a world where even cucumbers and underwear are wrapped in plastic, this landfill is probably an inevitability. We Americans generate the most waste in the world. Ulster County residents throw out around 1,500 pounds a year, which means every year, everybody in the county tosses out the equivalent of an entire cow. And those cows have to go somewhere.

What also appears to be an inevitability is that it will be in Wawarsing. And that’s what gives us pause.

Cornerstone found 11 candidates across the county. UCRRA said only five were usable. Two sites were in Wawarsing, one in Esopus, and two in Plattekill. Then, the Plattekill and Esopus sites were dismissed, leaving two options: Wawarsing and Wawarsing.

Many in Wawarsing felt it was always going to go this way.

This is a difficult dynamic, because of Wawarsing’s position in the county hierarchy. It’s easy to ask yourself if it’s a coincidence that the only possible places to put a landfill in the entire county just happened to be in its most out-of-the-way, low-income, politically unconnected town?

Residents near the most likely spot, Dairyland, have been asking why a waste management company in Montgomery hasn’t been contacted. Could they handle the county’s waste?

The Esopus site, placed off main roads near the most waste-generating stretch of the county, was dismissed because of toxic chemicals in the soil. We are not clear on why that already-subsidized soil remediation cannot be looped into the decade-long landfill preparation process.

It seems to us more environmentally viable to clean a Superfund site and use it as a landfill than it does to chop down a forest for a landfill and still have an uncleaned Superfund site elsewhere. If your goal is an environmentally sound facility, why wouldn’t you want to kill two birds with one stone, with the added bonus of not bulldozing the margins of one of the Nature Conversancy’s Last Great Places?

When we first reported this story, the response was pretty clear. “This is yet another example of the County treating the Town of Wawarsing like crap,” wrote former town supervisor Scott Carlsen. “Let's ‘dump’ on Wawarsing, the furthest town from Kingston.”

It’s hard to escape the feeling that by zeroing in on Wawarsing as the site of its landfill, Ulster is treating Wawarsing as a landfill. Still, despite opposition from locals and elected officials, UCRRA hasn’t budged. They spoke recently about their willingness to use eminent domain to make this happen.

If the UCRRA had found a better site in, say, Woodstock, what would happen? Would they talk about how eminent domain is on the table? Or would alternate options suddenly appear on the table?

We want to be clear: we genuinely do not know the answer, and we don’t want to throw out an accusation with no evidence. But what we do have is what many in Wawarsing seem to share: a suspicion.

We would like to know the precise reasons why Montgomery and Esopus aren’t viable options.