Letter to the Editor: County's Purchase of WTE Plant is Ill-Advised

Concerning the recently proposed Fairfax County purchase/takeover of the I-95 Incinerator in Lorton, the County Department of Public Works and Environmental Services (DPW&ES), seems to have tried mightily to justify this purchase on issues of absolute trust (ours), assumed proper oversight/control (theirs) and some VERY long-term-projected savings (now revealed to be BEYOND the next 25 years). In fact, it appears that even DPW’s more limited short-term savings don’t really start to show up in any significant way until about 2031 and only AFTER one factors in and nets out the losses it has to incur for the first approximately 20 years of its ownership (as compared to the Rent Option).  

As a result, this should clearly serve as justification for the public to demand a completely independent and certifiably competent technical oversight study - written-by somebody more knowledgeable about the waste industry other than the County’s own bureaucrats or one of its hired-gun consultants – before the Board of Supervisors makes its final decision about the plant later this spring.  Certainly, a much more aggressive effort in the short term – by the Board itself, if necessary - to try to negotiate better terms with Covanta for a new contractual arrangement (other than the current DPW-preferred Buy-Only one) would also seem to be a worthwhile venture as well.

While DPW has been trumpeting loudly the allegedly positive features of its takeover, it very conveniently leaves out information that similar past purchases or proposals have resulted in later revelations of actual or future negative consequences to municipalities when their bureaucracies’ initial glowing projections were found to have been somewhat over-zealous at best, or even rather disastrous at worse. 

One example – although DPW just hates to have this referenced - is Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which is currently toying with going into bankruptcy partly due to its incinerator-takeover debacle gone sour.  However, two much closer-to-home examples are the County’s past/proposed purchases of the Gatehouse-1 and –2 buildings in Merrifield and the Feds’/DC’s royally-bungled efforts vis-à-vis the Old Post Office Building in downtown District of Columbia.  And dare I even bring up the still-festering County purchase-contract boondoggle towards the end of last century, which gave us taxpayers that super-expensive/over-built County Government Center Complex (a/k/a Fairfax County’s “Taj Mahal”).

In any case, although only industrial revenue bonds would be used to buy the plant, this massive new debt would still have to be factored into the county’s overall debt capacity as considered by bond and credit-rating agencies. This has – grudgingly-admitted-to last week by the County’s Debt Manager – at least the potential of limiting the amount of debt and of even raising bond interest rates that the County would also someday need to incur in order to finance the construction and renovation of schools, parks and public safety facilities. All of these latter facilities, of course, are certainly much more important than wasting our hard-earned debt capacity and any future bond principal and interest payments (or even the extra-added so-called “citizen user-fees”, i.e. taxes by another name!) that will be needed to pay for what some view as the product of an all-too-reckless bureaucracy now embarked on a rather speculative takeover of a somewhat-dated-in-design old incinerator. 

Finally, many long-term Lorton area activists know all too well about how DPW’s past 25+ years of ownership of and/or operational control-over and involvement-in its several programs in Lorton and elsewhere have resulted in as few as 10 separately-distinct instances of maladministration, deception, dissembling and/or other rather questionable actions or inactions.  And today (especially with DPW’s direct complicity as a key secretive manipulator of the recent Laurel Hill Sportsplex/Landfill Fiasco getting as much negative publicity as it did at the time), such a notorious history has become even more widely known amongst even the broader South County Community. In effect, all of this recent and past history of our public servants within the County's DPW reveals how relevant – especially to this current incinerator issue - may be that old adage (often used to describe the likes of the County DPW and other similarly over-reaching/ill-performing bureaucracies):  ‘Trust Us ... We’re from the Government and we’re here to help.’”

Note - Neal McBride is a longtime resident of Lorton.