Too Good to be True: A Proposed Dump at the Site of the
Bennington Battle in the Town of Hoosick
by Tracy Frisch
A Land Speculator Comes to Town
Rumors had swirled around the town of Hoosick for nearly two years. A land speculator was offering astounding sums of money to large landowners in return for their holdings. But no one seemed to know for what purpose the land would be used.
An untold number of people received a solicitation letter from A. Brent Landis of Access Realty Company, Inc. in Waterford. One such letter, dated November 1, 2004, declared, “We represent a client who would like to purchase your property for $20,000 to $100,000 per acre plus granting you the right to live on the property for life.”
Town councilman Mark Surdam heard about the letters from people who attend his church. “We thought it was too good to be true,” he said.
Though residents queried the town board about the mysterious solicitations, the venture remained shrouded in secrecy for many months. Jack Smith, a retired small business owner, said that the real estate agent kept promising to tell town officials the purpose of the land acquisitions, but instead statements like “you will be proud to have our operation” were bandied about.
Ultimately, at least three landowners, all residing on Cottrell Road in the town of Hoosick and in the hamlet Walloomsac, signed contracts to sell their land to the unnamed client. The parcels adjoin the Walloomsac River and Bennington Battlefield and range in size from 116 to 482 acres, totaling 761 acres.
At least one of these properties, the largest, was a working farm. It belongs to the Cottrells, a hardworking, well-liked dairy farm family. Son Mark Cottrell currently serves as a town councilman. Attempts to contact the three landowners—known to have entered into the contracts—were unsuccessful.
If those who entered into these contracts had any more information than the rest of the community, they kept mum. One concerned resident thinks the silence can be explained by a confidentiality agreement sent to the landowners from Brent Landis’s attorney.
A Dump in Hoosick?
At the Hoosick Town Board meeting on July 10, 2006 real estate agent Brent Landis finally divulged the intention behind more than a year and a half of unexplained land speculation. He announced that an unknown entity called Wastetricity planned to develop a construction and demolition waste facility on the 700 acres he had optioned.
A week earlier, the town had received a host agreement letter from Wastetricity. While this letter was unavailable for review before press time, town officials implied that it promised funds for the municipality if it would facilitate the siting of a C & D debris operation.
The Wastetricity letter seems to have given officials the impression that the portion of the tipping fees the town of Hoosick would receive from the waste facility would eliminate the need for town taxes.
“When it was up and running, it [the C & D waste operation] could easily cover our [town] budget,” said Surdam. The potential property tax relief made the plan worthy of exploration.
“From day one, it was presented as a recycling facility,” he recalled. It was explained by Landis that most—70 to 80 percent—of the imported C & D waste would be recycled (or reprocessed), with only the remaining small percentage going into a landfill on site. Landis even said that he would arrange a tour of a similar facility.
In retrospect, the classic bait-and-switch tactic got the attention of town officials. The next time town officials met with Wastetricity, was at the tour of a recycling facility not owned or operated by them. “They [Wastetricity] corrected themselves and basically flip-flopped the numbers around,” Surdam related.
Wastetricity’s representatives also revealed that the landfill would be established first, and that any recycling facility would come later, if at all. “It seemed like the information changed,” he said.
One roadblock to a C & D landfill was the town’s local law that bans the operation of dumps and dumping anywhere in the township of Hoosick—except for at a municipally operated transfer station. Unless the Hoosick Town Board repealed this law, passed in November 2005, the Wastetricity idea could go nowhere.
Hard to Pin Down
Shifting facts and mind-boggling claims have characterized the scheme to import out-of-state waste into the unspoiled, rural hamlet of Walloomsac. First, it would be a recycling facility, then it was mostly or only a dump. At times, it included a particle or wafer board factory to reprocess waste wood.
Even the size of the dump has been hard to pin down. According to one newspaper story, the site would receive between 2,000 and 5,000 tons of C & D waste a day. A large, 40-yard dumpster normally holds around 5 tons of C & D waste.
“This landfill would make the Colonie dump look like a postage stamp,” said Smith.
Compared to all C & D waste landfills across New York State, the figures attributed to Wastetricity are indeed astronomical. In 2004, all regulated C & D dumps in New York took in a combined total of less than 9,000 tons of waste daily, assuming a five-day-a-week schedule.
“What we don’t have is facts. Landis has contracts on 700 acres. That might be the end of the facts right there,” quipped North Bennington resident Londa Weisman in an interview.
The name Wastetricity was cleverly made up specifically for the Hoosick project, explained resident Lisa Revet. “It’s just a name,” she said. No electric generation had been proposed for the site, and the “company” has no track record.
The identification of USA Waste Hauling & Recycling, Inc. of Enfield, CT as Wastetricity’s backer occurred in the September 12 edition of the Albany Times Union. This was the first tangible evidence of a corporation—and financial support—behind the dump plan.
USA Waste and its affiliates and subsidiaries serve more than 5,000 commercial, industrial, and municipal customers and more than 15,000 residential customers across New England with curbside pickups, recycling, and commercial roll-off containers. The company also offers building demolition services for projects of all sizes and asbestos hauling.
Distressed by the waste hauler connection, Smith pointed out that there is “no control of what goes into” dumpsters. Another resident with 25 years experience in construction echoed this concern. (See sidebar: A Deal Gone Sour)
With the town or the public, Wastetricity representatives Brent Landis, Paul Harrigan of Connecticut, and most recently Jonathan Murray have not been forthcoming about themselves or the business entity they are promoting.
In a brief phone conversation, Murray confirmed that his position was Wastetricity project manager and that he is employed by USA Waste Hauling. He said he was unavailable for further questions, referring this writer to Landis—who did not return calls. In a face-to-face meeting, he told Weisman that he had a dozen years’ experience in the waste field, but subsequently failed to supply any references or documentation.
Opposition Intensifies and Town Board Responds
By September 2006, the third month that the town board was officially considering the C & D waste project, both residents and at least some town officials had grown uneasy with Wastetricity’s secrecy and inconsistencies.
Skepticism mounted as the company failed to keep its promises of opening an office and providing information. It had also deferred and cancelled several anticipated public meetings. There was an ongoing stalemate in which Wastetricity demanded that the town of Hoosick hold the meeting for it for the purpose of keeping order.
The board meeting on September 11 attracted more people than any other in recent memory. Approximately 75 incensed residents crammed into the overflowing meeting room and stood in the hall to convey their outrage that the dump idea would be contemplated at all.
At the meeting citizens presented a few hundred signatures on petitions hastily gathered the previous weekend and in the parking lot before the meeting. Letters requesting interested-party status formed a stack two and a half inches high. A North Bennington, VT, group that came together a month earlier was distributing “Stop the Battlefield Dump” bumper stickers.
In discussing their concerns days after the meeting, opponents raised issues about environmental pollution, truck traffic, and impacts on property values and the Bennington Battlefield, an important Revolutionary War historical site. They questioned why their community should serve as the central dumping ground and if this were an appropriate type of development. They also emphasized their mistrust of Wastetricity.
Robert McWaters, a North Bennington village trustee, expressed the fears of his community. “I can’t see any way you’re going to satisfy me that it won’t pollute.”
Gary Sussman, an artist and longtime Hoosick resident, articulated the widespread sentiment against putting a dump in a beautiful, fertile valley, next to a river. A member of Civacure, a Hoosick-based organization working to revitalize the community, Sussman describes the Walloomsac River as a destination central to the future prosperity of the area.
The cynical symbolism of allowing a dump next to the Bennington Battlefield Historic Site was not lost on local citizens. Battles took place in some of the actual fields of the proposed future landfill (see side bar: The Battle of Bennington). The defeat of the British forces by militia from New Hampshire and Vermont was pivotal to the outcome of the Revolutionary War. The proximity of the dump with its daily traffic of at least one hundred tandem tractor-trailers, by one estimate, (possibly an underestimate) would undoubtedly discourage people from visiting this important historic site.
After about a dozen citizens had spoken—all opposing Wastetricity—the town board responded. Councilmen Bob Ryan and Mark Surdam expressed their loss of confidence in Wastetricity. It had failed to provide requested information and had dishonestly presented a recycling project, when it actually had a dump in mind.
Supervisor Marilyn Douglas echoed these concerns and then firmly dismissed the idea of the dump at the packed meeting. She pledged to support the existing town law prohibiting dumps and dumping.
In a recent interview, Douglas defended her rejection of the dump, noting her broad concerns for her lifelong community. “For every dollar offered [referring to the host community agreement],” she said, “You have to ask, what are the consequences?”
“If this is such a good thing,” she asked, “wouldn’t it be better downstate, closer to the source? How will this affect property values 50 years from now? We have to think long-term. People have to breathe.”
Quick, Big Money, but is it Real?
Some local officials and concerned citizens worried that putting an end to the idea of importing C & D waste would harm the prospects for the Cottrell family or alienate their friendship and good feeling.
“We’re in a tough spot because it’s a windfall for them,” said Surdam, who serves on the town board with Mark Cottrell. (While Cottrell did not participate in the discussion about Wastetricity at the September board meeting, he remained in the front of the room sitting alongside his fellow board members rather than joining the audience.) “That’s the personal side of things, but still you have to do what’s right for the town.”
“I felt that if nothing else, we owed it to the Cottrells to hear Wastetricity out,” said a Walloomsac resident who was fighting the project.
“You always hope they won’t take it personally,” said a vocal dump opponent.
On September 10, the Cottrells milked their cows for the last time. They had sold the herd, which was loaded and transported away from the farm.
As one of the few towns in Rensselaer County with no zoning, Hoosick may have seemed easy prey for speculators looking to site a dump. Hoosick still has significant amounts of agricultural lands being farmed, and therefore potentially available for development. Severe economic pressures make dairy farms especially vulnerable targets. But others stress that transforming a farm into a waste facility is not the way to save agriculture or to improve a farm family’s finances. They say farmers, like others in business, have to accept responsibility for diversifying and taking other measures to make their enterprises work in changing times.
Would those who entered the Access Realty contracts ever get anywhere near the astounding figure they had signed up for—even if the town got a dump?
“Hope is a beautiful thing, but being naïve isn’t always productive,” contends Mark Revet, who with his wife, Lisa, runs a long-term care insurance agency. He shared his observations about how such speculators function.
The standard operating procedure, he explained, is to hook potential sellers into their web by offering unheard of amounts of money. As soon as word gets out about what they have in mind for the land, opposition arises in the community. The buyer returns in a year and says that in light of all our time and expenses fighting to get our project through, we must offer you a lesser amount. This process drags on for several more years.
When the contract expires, the buyer comes back with another reduced offer. All the while, the landowners are under contract and cannot sell or do anything else with their land. And the controversy is making their life horrible. Eventually, they may even settle for a below-market-value buyout.
“My belief is that they [Brent Landis, Paul Harrigan, and associates] don’t have any money,” surmised Connie Kheel, a resident who has been instrumental in protecting local farmland from development. The signed contracts would be something they could sell.
After the Access Realty letter she received piqued her curiosity, Kheel learned of the terms that Landis was offering to landowners from a friend who had met with the realtor.
According to her informant, the initial payment for putting your land under contract was a measly $100 per parcel. For each of the next three or four years, $1,000 would be paid. The option would expire in five years if the buyer failed to come up with full approval and to carry out the purchase.
The Allure of Garbage for Economic Development
One thing Landis came through with was the tour of a C & D facility. Several weeks after the July town board meeting, town officials went on a road trip to see Taylor Recycling in the Lower Hudson Valley town of Montgomery, near Newburgh.
Unlike the Wastetricity plan, the Montgomery site consisted only of a recycling facility. It had no landfill and was located in an industrial park, not on farmland adjacent to a river and historic site. No relationship between Wastetricity and Taylor Recycling has been identified.
At Taylor C & D waste is sorted and processed for sales and land filling elsewhere. One of the Hoosick visitors described it as “well-run, clean, and orderly” and commented that its footprint was “not so large”—comparing it to Wastetricity’s 700 acres under contract in Walloomsac.
The economic opportunities in recycling and starting a business to process waste got at least one councilman’s attention. Surdam said, “Every community has to think about what to do with garbage. No one wants dumps. At first I thought this is the way our community could do our part.”
“Part of me wishes these guys [Wastetricity] were for real,” he continued. “They made it easy to reject them.” He suggested that if a reputable company like Taylor would come to the town of Hoosick, the prospect could be appealing.
Has the Dump Idea Been Buried?
Some citizens are disappointed by what they regard as the town board’s lack of decisive closure to this chapter of the town’s history. Another perspective is that there is nothing to vote on, as long as the town board stands by Hoosick’s no dump law.
Several dump opponents characterized some of the town board members as “luke-warm” or “on the fence” in their rejection of the company and its waste-importing plan.
The reason cited by several town officials for ending discussions with Wastetricity was that it was neither trustworthy nor forthcoming with information.
Mark Revet is critical of this logic. “Regardless of whether the person proposing it is Mother Teresa or the biggest crook, the question is whether we want a 233-year dump!”
Londa Weisman underlined one of the lingering fears. A North Bennington resident since 1963, she alerted her nearby community about the project. “I’m worried that behind them [Wastetricity] are the resources and determination of Wal-Mart.” In Bennington, the giant retailer succeeded in overturning the town’s store-size restriction so a second, super-sized Wal-Mart could be built.
One explanation for Wastetricity’s strategy is that those associated with them have been trying to put together a deal that they can sell to a company. The discovery of USA Waste’s involvement—the day after the last town board meeting—has done little to allay worries.
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