Marblehead Transfer Station Traffic Talk Rescheduled

MARBLEHEAD, MA — A public meeting to discuss the traffic impact of shifting the access burden to the Marblehead Transfer Station to the Green Street and Woodfin Terrace neighborhoods that was abruptly canceled this week has been rescheduled for Wednesday.

The meeting will be held in the Lower Conference Room at the Mary Alley Building on Widger Road at 1 p.m. The meeting will also be streamed virtually on Zoom here.

The Marblehead Board of Health in April pulled two town meeting warrants requesting a $6 million override to fund a new transfer station in favor of exploring the "Plan B" proposal that could cost a quarter of that total but will redirect traffic to the alternative access points on Green Street and Arnold Terrace.

The second proposal, which was said would cost about $1.5 million and would not require a town meeting vote for a tax override, was met with skepticism from a group of residents called the Green Street Neighbors Association, who expressed concern at April's meeting about both increased noise and air pollution from the additional trucks that would idle in their neighborhoods before and during transfer station hours.

The Board of Health then commissioned the traffic study to be discussed at Wednesday's meeting. But some neighborhood residents who have seen it told Patch that the study did little to allay their worries about the environmental, health and quality-of-life impacts of the changes.

"I believe a traffic study that only counted vehicles going to the pit as commercial traffic would produce a significant undercount, particularly if the study was conducted substantially before the start of the gardening season," Arnold Terrace resident David Lieberman said in a letter to the Board of Health that he shared with Patch. "There will be more diesel traffic heading into the station to use the yard waste dump in spring and summer, and that increased traffic will coincide with precisely the time of year when abutting residents would be choosing to leave their windows open."

Lieberman added that residents most affected would be the ones who followed the Board of Health's recommendations two years ago to shift to working from home amid the COVID-19 health crisis.

"We are doing what, in every other context, this Board would ask of us: keeping social distance and doing our part to reduce the risk of disease spread in our community," Lieberman wrote. "I would hope the Board would recognize this and see itself as honor bound to acknowledge it in its decision-making by doing what it can to mitigate the impact it has on our living and working conditions."

As was the case in the canceled meeting, the agenda for this Wednesday's meeting includes a transfer station update, traffic study review and period of public comment — but does not include an agenda item providing for a possible vote on accepting the "Plan B" proposal.

(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at Scott.Souza@Patch.com. Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)