A plan to move the city’s most heavily used bulk trash drop-off facility from Sisson Street to Falls Road appears to be dead.
Mayor Brandon Scott’s 13-member Sisson Street Task Force voted unanimously Monday to remove a proposed site at 2801 Falls Road from consideration for relocating the Sisson Street Sanitation Yard and Citizen Drop-Off Center in Remington. One panel member abstained and three were absent.
The task force cast a similar vote in a November 2025 “straw poll,” but that was before all the members were sworn in by the mayor. At Monday’s meeting, panel member Jed Weeks proposed that the panel take an official vote to delete the Falls Road property from further consideration now that the members have been sworn in.
“We’ve had a lot of meetings, and I would like to maybe just formally vote to get Falls Road off the table so we can say we’ve done something,” he said.
The Falls Road parcel, a storage yard owned by the Potts & Callahan construction company, had drawn opposition because it is located along a picturesque stretch of the Jones Falls Valley, and also in a flood plain. Scott formed the task force to recommend the best ways for the city to dispose of bulk trash and hazardous waste if the city’s Department of Public Works closed its current facility on 2840 Sisson Street to make way for private development.
Task force chair and City Council member Odette Ramos said the panel’s deliberations affect more than just the Sisson Street operation.
“The whole discussion about Sisson Street has turned into a larger conversation” about how the city should handle solid waste “writ large,” she said.
The task force advises the mayor, and panelists acknowledge that Scott need not follow its recommendations. The Monday vote signaled that task force members are strongly against that option and will no longer consider it.
Alan Robinson, deputy director of the public works department and the task force member who abstained from the vote, told the panel on Monday that the Sisson Street facility is by far the most heavily used of the Baltimore’s four bulk trash drop-off facilities.
Between Dec. 17, 2025, and Jan. 9, 2026, Robinson said, the Sisson Street facility got 2,608 visits while the Eastern Citizens’ Convenience Center on Bowleys Lane received 1,491, the Northwest Transfer Station on Reisterstown Road had 190 drop-offs and the Quarantine Road landfill got 378. The Southwest Citizen’s Convenience Center on Reedbird Avenue is currently closed.
The mayor had orginally sought the panel’s recommendations by December 2025, but the deadline was extended. The task force’s next meetings have tentatively been set for Jan. 26 and Feb. 9.
Ramos said on Monday that she wants to be sure the panel gets all the information it needs. As a result, “we’re going to push our recommendations probably until March,” she said. “We want to be deliberative.”
