Council to Vote on Replacing Upper Marlboro Landfill With Transfer Station

Even on the nicest days, Bobbie Mack rolls up her car windows as she gets close to home in Upper Marlboro to block out the stench wafting from the only landfill in Prince George's County, which is located across the street.

"I put Bounce in my car vents," she said. "That way, I get the Bounce smell, not the trash."

After more than 40 years of operation, the landfill on Brown Station Road will reach capacity in 2011, and Mack thinks the time has come to put the county's trash elsewhere. So does the County Council, which tomorrow is scheduled to vote to replace the landfill with a trash-transfer station somewhere else, where garbage would be trucked and crushed before being shipped to landfills beyond Prince George's.

"I think this is an opportunity for the County Council to look forward," said Mack, who has lived next to the county landfill since 1978. "We have done our civic duty."

But residents who live near the proposed transfer station site off Route 301, south of the county courthouse and administrative building, don't want garbage near their homes any more than do Mack and her neighbors. They believe it makes no sense to add truck traffic to the already clogged highway or to put the station in what they think remains a relatively pristine rural area. They do not trust county officials who have downplayed the possible environmental impacts and smell of an enclosed transfer station.

"I walk through that site three times a week, and I think this is environmental suicide," said Mary Benson, who lives nearby. "It is one of the last wild areas of Prince George's."

For years, county leaders have been bedeviled by the politically sensitive issue of where to put garbage. A second landfill in Bowie closed in 2000, raising concerns about the county's diminishing garbage space. The next year, an effort to place a trash-transfer site on 200 acres close to Bowie State University died after nearby residents raised objections.

The council rejected a recommendation by the county's Department of Environmental Resources in 2006 that the county build the transfer center at the same site now under consideration on Route 301.

Instead, council members asked the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission to hire a new consultant and complete a new study weighing "community input" more heavily as a criteria in recommending sites.

The new study took more than a year and involved four public meetings. The study excluded putting the transfer station at the landfill. It still recommended the site on Route 301.

County Council Chairman Samuel H. Dean (D-Mitchellville) said the county-owned 216-acre property makes sense because it is near major highways and a rail line and is across the street from a wastewater treatment plant.

"We have to begin to find a way to handle our refuse," said Dean, who said he likely will vote for the proposal. "To me, this is the most efficient and effective way to handle our rubbish."