Glastonbury’s Town Council voted Tuesday to end the town’s 38-year business relationship with Connecticut’s trash authority, which will close its Hartford trash-to-energy plant in July, and contract instead with an Enfield company to dispose of trash and recyclable materials brought to the town’s collection points.
The council voted 8-0, to exercise the town’s option to opt out of its contract with the Materials Innovation and Recycling Authority and contract with Murphy Road Recycling LLC, which is named after a Hartford location but is now based on Mullen Road in Enfield.
Republican Councilman John Cavanna didn’t participate in the council’s discussion or vote on the issue.
The principals of Murphy Road Recycling are Frank and Gerald Antonacci, according to the secretary of the state’s website.
A major difference between the old and new contracts is that the town will no longer dictate the disposal decisions of the private haulers that collect trash from many local homes and businesses.
MIRA’s contract and a town ordinance require flow control, in which all trash and recyclables collected in town must go to the authority. The Murphy Road Recycling contract will include no such provision. The council is expected to amend the town code to eliminate the legal basis for flow control.
The town was one of the original members of the Connecticut Resources Recovery Authority in 1984, according to Superintendent of Sanitation Michael J. Bisi. In 2014 the state legislature made organizational changes and replaced CRRA with MIRA.
Under either name, a central purpose of the authority has been to operate a trash-to-energy plant. But MIRA’s Hartford plant is nearing the end of its useful life, and the authority is planning to close it in July, Town Manager Richard J. Johnson told the council.
The town’s current 15-year contract with MIRA requires the authority to provide trash disposal and recycling service to the town until 2027, Johnson told the council. With the trash-to-energy plant closing, MIRA will have to truck trash to out-of-state landfills. That would lead to increases in disposal, or “tipping,” fees.
MIRA’s current tipping fee of $105 per ton would increase to $116 per ton under the existing contract or $111 per ton if the town opted for a new five-year contract that would impose new limits on its ability to opt out. Johnson said the opt-out point in the current contract was reached some time ago.
Faced with those cost increases, the town administration requested proposals for disposal service from private companies. It received four proposals, two of which remained under consideration Tuesday, according to Johnson.
The company offered as a potential alternative to Murphy Road Recycling was CWPM LLC of Plainville, of which Jason Manafort is president.
Comparison of the proposals was complicated because they included prices that differed from year to year as well as differing treatment of corrugated cardboard and other recyclable materials.
In recommending a four-year contract with Murphy Road Recycling, the town administration offered calculations showing that it should cost the town less than the CWPM proposal in most, possibly all, of those years — and less than MIRA’s in the one year for which the authority has quoted prices.
Johnson said a concern about the CWPM proposal was the potential “volatility” of recycling costs.
Murphy Road Recycling will now have to find landfills or trash-to-energy plants with excess capacity to take the town’s trash.
