During the Leominster City Council meeting on April 28th, former state Senator and current marijuana lobbyist Jennifer Flanagan wasted everyone’s time with an irritated rant about how opponents to “The Fairgrounds” (a project she seemed to know very little about) were hysterical neurotics and dedicated enemies of progress. It was, overall, silly and condescending. However, Flanagan did make one point I think should be addressed, because I’ve seen it before: a manufactured sense of urgency about the landfill “needing” to be developed.

This idea is repeated often and has a certain thought-killing quality that prevents exploration of alternatives: the land is empty, so we need to fill it. It isn’t developed, therefore it needs to be. It’s a problem, and the solution is to make it someone else’s problem, because that just “makes sense”. I can see how someone could make this claim: the landfill’s mandatory 30 year monitoring period ends soon, and it does not make the City any money. In fact, it costs the City money to monitor and maintain. Why wouldn’t we sell it to some gaming corporation, and let the buck stop somewhere else?

My view on it is simple:  I reject the basic premise that the landfill needs to make money. Perceiving every aspect of life through the lens of profit-motive deeply diminishes and cheapens our lives. Developers take one look at those 30 acres and their eyes turn into huge dollar signs that immediately see all the red flags as insignificant details that affect insignificant people.

I’m sure that if early residents of our town could look into the future, they would not have put the landfill where they did and they would not have allowed it to be filled with hazardous industrial waste and toxic chemicals. Plastics manufacturing made Leominster what it is today, and the city paid a heavy price for its prosperity: pollution, cancer, chemical exposures, and a landfill that should be confined in a hazardous waste facility but sits in a swamp instead. Unfortunately, historical residents could not see into the future and made decisions that made sense at the time, so the Mechanic St landfill is what it is: not contained and not safe, but stable (for the moment).

I take no pleasure in reporting that the City does not have a good track record when it comes to taking responsibility for its landfills. In many ways, Leominster has been only a reluctant caretaker: the Mechanic St site was not safeguarded during the main decades of industrial dumping, it was not closed in the 1980s like it was supposed to be, and the only reason it was capped at all is because the Department of Environmental Protection issued an Administrative Consent Order (the first of several) forcing the issue. It was listed as “For Sale” in 2008, barely a decade after capping. The landfill on Johnny Appleseed Lane, containing material excavated from the Mechanic St site during construction of the Leominster Connector in 1977, has been completely ignored for almost 50 years despite a 1996 DEP order to assess it (which the City refused to do). 

All that being said, we are today in an enviable position, one where we can make a different choice. We can acknowledge our history and our real responsibility to it, and make every attempt to safeguard the next generations. To do this, we need to both look into the past with clarity and humility and do what previous generations could not: try and look into the future. One possible future: a gambling investment company, Baystate Racing LLC, has proposed adding at least one million tons of fill to the landfill, building a horse track on top, and developing the abutting property into a gaming establishment, hotel, and apartment complex. The proposal is widely considered by opponents to be a “backdoor deal” made by certain elected officials in return for payouts, “infrastructure improvements,” and the imagined disappearance of the landfill problem.

When something is really important, talking around it with feel-good fluff gets you nowhere; you need to cut to the bone. So, at the risk of being a little too excessively honest: this most recent attempt to make the landfill someone else’s problem shows a profound disregard for the public’s trust and the well-being of others. Passing the buck to a corporation is nothing more than an attempt to evade responsibility by making another entity deal with the problem we created…and who is that entity? A paper company with no assets and no experience? Giving the landfill to an LLC that could dissolve itself at any time and be free from the burden of responsibility is not a viable solution. Any attempt to develop, monetize, or sell the landfill to private interests actively works against the public good.

Any historian can tell you that the past is not really passed. The past informs everything about the present and shapes the future, just like our actions today will shape the future for everyone who comes after us. At the end of the day, the landfill will always be the city’s obligation. Leominster created the landfill. It is our responsibility and our duty to care for it, to protect it, and to protect residents and the environment from it. The most responsible thing the City could do is leave it alone, protect and preserve it, so that maybe one day future generations won’t have to worry about vinyl chloride, benzene in the groundwater, or methane next to houses. If leaving it alone is truly impossible, if it absolutely must have “something” on it, why not something normal? A sports field, a rewilded meadow, a small park, walking paths, a picnic area? Something besides a monument of excessive, uncritical obedience to business development. Something kind. Something for the neighborhood that is, literally, relying on the City to protect it. 

Something that adds to life instead of something that, in so many ways, would take away.