We can’t find fault with the local garbage company’s desire to
open a transfer station in Gilroy with more waste capacity than the
company’s transfer station on Llagas Road in San Martin. Anyone who
has hauled yard waste and items that wouldn’t sell in a garage sale
to the San Martin transfer station knows about that facility’s
limited capacity.
We can’t find fault with the local garbage company’s desire to open a transfer station in Gilroy with more waste capacity than the company’s transfer station on Llagas Road in San Martin. Anyone who has hauled yard waste and items that wouldn’t sell in a garage sale to the San Martin transfer station knows about that facility’s limited capacity.
The company has every right to search for bigger site. But while the former Westside Transport property on congested state Highway 152, which has been leased to South Valley Disposal by Gilroy landowner Al DeFrancesco, would be large enough, its location couldn’t be worse. Frankly, this location stinks.
The entrance to the Westside Transport site sits just beyond the point where 152 bottlenecks from four lanes to two and just before a bend in the highway that obscures oncoming traffic. It’s next to a flood control channel paralleling Llagas Creek. It’s directly across from the entrance to Gilroy Foods, and it’s directly west of the Pacheco Pass retail center under development (while some Gilroyans may feel that putting a dump in back of the Wal-Mart Supercenter would be a symbolically appropriate gesture, the odor and air quality issues could drive shoppers away).
If you think the traffic situation on 152 is bad today, just wait five years when the proposed Gilroy transfer station is operating at full capacity. Imagine, a line of garbage trucks, flatbeds and overloaded pickups trying to turn left across oncoming 152 traffic into the entrance. That’s not just a traffic problem, that’s a recipe for perpetual congestion. And gruesome head-on collisions.
We can understand South Valley Disposal’s desire to expand its capacity beyond what the San Martin site can handle. The proposed Gilroy site is immensely larger and would allow the company to process significantly more garbage and recyclables with room left over to relocate its truck yard on Alexander Street into the same facility. The site is also conveniently close to Norcal Waste Systems’ Pacheco Pass landfill a few miles east of Gilroy on 152. Norcal Waste Systems is South Valley Disposal’s parent company.
A Norcal company spokesman contacted by Dispatch reporter Peter Crowley expressed confidence that “the issues that have been raised can be resolved.” Indeed the company does seem confident. It has already hung a South Valley Disposal shingle on the old Westside Transport building.
“Our goal is that our operation as a waste management facility is invisible to the community,” the Norcal spokesman said. We are not reassured.
While the site may be large enough to be invisible to sight — if not undetectable to smell — we hope that city planners who’ve had a whiff of this project will reject it before it goes any further. This isn’t a matter of NIMBY (not in my backyard), but NOMBH (not on my busiest highway).
If the company is dead set on moving operations to Gilroy, there has to be a better place, and it is incumbent on Norcal and South Valley Disposal, not the city, to come up with a reasonable alternative.
