A mayoral task force has voted to recommend that the city close its popular bulk trash drop-off facility on Sisson Street to make way for private development – but only after certain conditions are met. Mayor Brandon Scott’s 13-member Sisson Street Task Force voted on Saturday to recomme nd that the Sanitation Yard and Citizen Drop-Off Center at 2840 Sisson Street be closed permanently “after certain metrics are met” to show that the city’s bulk trash and hazardous waste disposal needs can be addressed in other ways. Panel members acknowledged that it may take three to six years to reach the metrics they want to see and said the Sisson Street facility ought to stay open until then – a stipulation that would prevent any immediate redevelopment of the four-acre parcel on the west side of Sisson Street between 28th and 29th streets. Scott formed the task force in September to recommend the best way for the city to handle bulk trash and hazardous waste disposal if the Department of Public Works (DPW) were to close the Sisson Street facility, the most heavily used of several trash transfer stations in Baltimore. City officials disclosed in August that they had been working on a plan to move the bulk trash facility to 2801 Falls Road, where the Potts and Callahan construction company has a storage yard that it would lease to the city. Under the city’s plan, the Sisson Street parcel would be sold to a private company for commercial development once the drop-off facility is either closed or relocated. Seawall Development, considered the likely buyer, has proposed building a grocery store-anchored commercial center on the property. After receiving strong opposition to the Falls Road plan, Scott said in September that he wanted the task force to consider all options for the future of the Sisson Street facility, including keeping it where it is, moving it or simply closing it. Task force members were told that they serve in an advisory capacity and that any final decisions about the fate of the Sisson Street parcel will be made by the mayor. The meeting on Saturday lasted three and a half hours and was the latest of nearly a dozen that the panel has had since last fall, including two during which members took public testimony. Options that were ruled out The panel took its vote after ruling out the idea of recommending that the Sisson Street facility be relocated to another site in the city, either temporarily or permanently. Several months ago, panel members eliminated the Falls Road parcel as a relocation candidate because it’s in a floodplain and along a picturesque stretch of the Jones Falls Valley, among other reasons. Seawall announced last week that it has a contract to buy the Potts and Callahan property but not for use as a trash drop-off site. Panel members said they were ruling out the idea of relocating the facility to other sites as well because they have been unable to identify any parcels that are outside a floodplain and could meet the city’s criteria for replacing the one on Sisson Street. For example, the mayor has said he doesn’t want to open a new drop-off center in a predominantly Black neighborhood, which eliminates certain candidates, and public works department officials have indicated they need a parcel that’s at least four acres in size if not more. The panel considered nearly a dozen candidates before concluding that none would meet the city’s needs for one reason or another. Panel members also said they didn’t want to recommend keeping the Sisson Street facility open permanently if it would prevent the land from being redeveloped in ways that would benefit Remington. The Greater Remington Improvement Association (GRIA) has a long-range plan that identifies the Sisson Street parcel as a good site for a walkable, mixed-use development project that would be compatible with other revitalization efforts in the area if the drop-off facility can be relocated. Numerous residents and business owners from Remington testified in person and wrote to the task force saying that the drop-off facility, while a convenient place to dispose of bulk trash items, wasn’t the highest and best use for the city-owned land and that keeping it on Sisson Street would prevent the community from meeting its long-term development goals. ‘Eventual closing’   Since the panel didn’t want to keep the Sisson Street facility open permanently and members haven’t found a suitable site where it could move, the only remaining option was to close it and not replace it. For this option to make sense, however, timing was a key consideration. The panel members said they didn’t want to recommend that the Sisson Street parcel be closed right away because it’s so heavily used. It’s also the city’s most centrally-located drop-off facility. Panel members said they feared that if the DPW closed the Sisson Street facility without giving city residents other options for disposing of bulk trash and hazardous waste items, cases of illegal trash dumping would increase around the city. Other trash drop-off facilities in the city besides the one on Sisson Street include: The Eastern Citizens’ Convenience Center at 6101 Bowleys Lane; the Southwest Citizen’s Convenience Center at 701 Reedbird Avenue and a landfill at 6100 Quarantine Road in South Baltimore. There’s also the Northwest Transfer Station at 5030 Reisterstown Road and a facility with limited services at 4325 York Road. The Reedbird Avenue property is currently closed for a renovation project that is expected to take three years to complete, and a separate improvement project is planned for the Bowleys Lane facility. Both projects are expected to give those sites capacity to process more bulk trash and enable them to offer more services, helping to fill any void left by the closure of the Sisson Street facility. After lengthy discussions over several meetings and weighing hundreds of public comments, the task force members said they would be willing to recommend “eventual closing” of the Remington facility “after DPW meets specific milestones for reducing the dependence on Sisson Street.” If the milestones are not met, they said, Sisson Street should stay open until they are met. Among the milestones, they said, were that the facilities at both Bowleys Lane and Reedbird Avenue “must be open and operational” before the Sisson Street facility closes. In addition, the panel recommended that the city “implement a strategic public relations and community engagement campaign to reduce dependence on Sisson Street” and encourage residents to use the Reedbird Avenue and Bowleys Lane facilities when they are redeveloped with more capacity. “Consider a specific and targeted campaign to encourage the 50 percent of Sisson users who live closer to the other sites to use those sites once developed and open,” the panel members recommended. “Dedicate funding to understand what users need to see at Reedbird and Bowleys Lane and integrate into the design of the renovated sites.” The task force members indicated that it could be three to six years before the Sisson Street facility closes in their proposed timetable, “depending on achieving milestones and the completion of renovations and opening of the Reedbird site.” One objective of setting milestones and conditions, they said, is to “wean” people off of using the Sisson Street facility long before it closes. One way to get people to use other facilities more, they suggested, would be to move drop-off days for household hazardous waste items from Sisson Street to another site, most likely Bowleys Lane. The panel members said they’d like to reduce the amount of trash dropped off at all of the city’s facilities through other means, such as reducing the wait times for bulk trash pickups around the city and scheduling more “dumpster days” in neighborhoods that have the most need. Currently, the city schedules four dumpster days per neighborhood per year – days when DPW employes bring dumpsters to a given community – and the panel suggested increasing the frequency to six dumpster days per year in certain areas. Members also want the DPW to collect more data on tonnage of trash dropped off at all of the city’s facilities so officials have a baseline of information and can track what’s happening from year to year. Other steps that the task force would like to see the city take before closing the Sisson Street facility include: Improving bulk trash disposal service for residents of multi-family buildings; shifting household recycling and materials from the city’s special benefits districts to the York Road facility, and coming up with a plan for putting the Sisson Street parcel to “productive use” in a way that’s consistent with GRIA’s goals and backed by the community, so it doesn’t remain dormant for years. ‘Fascinating exercise’ City council member Odette Ramos, chair of the task force, said the panel’s work evolved over the past six months from primarily searching for one site where the Sisson Street facility could move to looking at the city’s entire bulk trash and hazardous waste disposal ecosystem. “It ended up being not just about one site,” she said, “but really about our sanitation infrastructure writ large.” Now that the task force members have come to a consensus, she said on Saturday, they will issue a final report and she will brief Mayor Scott on their recommendations. “I have to say that this was a fascinating exercise,” Ramos said. “It was interesting to see the variety of things that people are saying.  There’s a lot of passion about this particular site. [DPW and its crew] should be very proud of the fact that they run such a tight ship and do such a great job that folks are so in love with this place because they really feel at home and served and it’s great, so that’s a victory for public service.” ...read more read less