Riverhead Seeks Bids to Cap Youngs Avenue Landfill

By Mitchell Freedman, Newsday, Melville, N.Y.

Nov. 2–Riverhead officials are seeking bids to close and cap the town’s old landfill on Youngs Avenue, and Supervisor Phil Cardinale said he hopes the two-decade saga of shutting it down will end in another year, at an additional cost of about $10 million.

“What we’re seeing now is the beginning of the last act,” he said in a statement.

The cost overruns at the landfill and who should be held responsible for them have become a political issue.

James Stark, the Republican former supervisor who is running against Cardinale, said the timing of the decision to seek bids was “political … silly season.”

Stark said that if Cardinale is correct, the town will have spent about $56 million on the project by the time it is all done.

The landfill, like all the others on Long Island, was ordered closed by the State Department of Environmental Conservation in 1994 because rainwater that worked its way through the buried garbage was carrying contaminants down into the groundwater.

But while other towns closed and capped their landfills for tens of millions of dollars, Riverhead decided to try a DEC-approved experiment in reclamation.

In 2002, contractors started digging up the landfill and pulling out sand, metal and other recyclables.

The garbage that could not be processed was trucked out of state for disposal.

At the time, the town bragged its landfill would turn into a “land empty” over five years, leaving them with 70 acres of valuable property that could be used for a park or sold to a developer.

But after town officials thought they had reached the bottom of the landfill in 2003, they found that the original survey work had been wrong, and that they would have to excavate much deeper than originally planned.

Cost estimates soared, the firm that did the survey work was sued — the case is still unresolved — and the town feared a $40-million overrun.

Final totals for the cost overrun may not be known for years.

But Cardinale said the expenses of the final closure work will likely be less than $10 million.

Bids are to be opened on Dec. 3.

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