After weeks of contentious negotiations to come up with a suitable alternative for shipping 860,000 tons of trash out of Connecticut annually, state lawmakers now see a potential way out of their messy political quagmire — even if few seem excited about the plan. “We should have done a better job,” was the blunt assessment from House Speaker Matt Ritter, D-Hartford, upon announcing Monday that there is no money in the state’s two-year, $51 billion budget dedicated toward the development of a new waste-disposal facility.
Instead, lawmakers appear to have settled on a plan authorizing up to $500 million in bonding from the Connecticut Green Bank, a quasi-public agency established in 2011 to provide financing for renewable energy projects. With a potential funding source in place for the future, lawmakers said they hope to soon begin the process replacing Hartford’s shuttered Materials Innovation and Recycling Authority, which has resulted in millions of trash bags being shipped each year to landfills in Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Lawmakers behind the proposal cautioned that it could still take years of negotiations and a politically-fraught permitting process to settle upon a type of facility capable of handling hundreds of thousands of tons of trash.