A City Council bill that would authorize public officials to sell the Sisson Street bulk trash transfer station property for private development has been put on hold, pending the recommendations of a mayoral task force.
Council member Odette Ramos told a Standing Room Only meeting of the Hampden Community Council on Thursday that no immediate action will be taken on the recently-introduced bill, No. 25-0094, now that Mayor Brandon Scott has announced the formation of the ‘Sisson Street Task Force’ to study a proposal to move the Sisson Street Sanitation Yard and Citizen Drop-Off Center at 2840 and 2842 Sisson St. to land along Falls Road.
Introduced on Aug. 18, the legislation if passed would authorize the Mayor and City Council to sell the 5.6 acre transfer station parcel on Sisson Street, referred to by many as ‘The Dump,’ for private development. Council President Zeke Cohen sponsored it on behalf of the Scott administration, and public hearings are required before the council can take final action.
Ramos said the enabling legislation was paused after Scott announced on Wednesday that he wants his task force to study the idea and report back to him.
“That ordinance has been put on hold during this task force time,” Ramos said of the bill. “If it comes up again, there will be public hearings” before any final decisions are made, and the task force will have public meetings, she said. “This is not the only meeting.”
As of now, “there’s been no date for the hearing, there’s been no date for our sale,” she said.
RFP process
In January of 2024, the Baltimore Development Corp. (BDC) sought proposals from bidders interested in buying and developing the Sisson Street parcel and set a deadline of Feb. 9, 2024. The quasi-public agency has never disclosed how many bids it received, what the bidders proposed to build or how much they would pay for the land, which is on the western edge of Remington.
The BDC specified in its Request for Proposals (RFP) that the selected bidder must agree that it “will not solicit press coverage or answer unsolicited questions about its development program from print, radio, television, social media or electronic media until it has secured an Exclusive Negotiating Privilege with the BDC.”
The current board’s approach is different from that of predecessor boards, when executives such as Walter Sondheim Jr. and Martin Millspaugh allowed reporters and others to view various development proposals shortly after they came in, with only the financial aspects of the submissions redacted.
By sharing information, Sondheim and Millspaugh obtained community reactions that they used to help determine which competing proposal would be the “best and highest use” for a given site. The current BDC board discusses development proposals in closed sessions that keep the general public out and uninformed. It typically stations a BDC staffer outside the door of its closed meetings to prevent anyone not on the board from hearing what members are saying.
Likely buyer
The transfer station occupies most of the land bounded by Sisson Street on the east, 28th Street on the south, the Jones Falls Expressway on the west and 29th Street on the north. For years it has been a location for city residents to bring bulk trash items. According to City Council member James Torrence, it is the busiest of several bulk trash drop-off centers that the city’s Department of Public Works operates.
One company that submitted a proposal for Sisson Street is Seawall Development, which has completed a number of other projects in the Remington area, including the Remington Row apartments and the R House food hall. Seawall also plans to build a large mixed-use project called Sisson East on the opposite side of the street from the drop-off center.
Seawall principal Thibault Manekin has told members of the Greater Remington Improvement Association (GRIA) that he envisions replacing the drop-off facility with a commercial center anchored by a grocery store, with surface parking for shoppers. He told GRIA’s land use committee about his plans because he wanted a letter of support from the organization to include with his proposal. He technically didn’t violate the BDC’s secrecy decree because he shared information before the BDC’s deadline for submissions and wasn’t yet officially a bidder. Seawall is considered the likely buyer of the Sisson Street parcel, but it needs both the council and the city’s Board of Estimates to approve the sale.
When Bill No. 25-0094 was introduced, it was referred to the council’s Land Use and Transportation Committee for a public hearing, but no date was ever announced. The administration had initially set a target for the sales ordinance to be heard on second reader by the full council on Sept. 29 and on third and final reader on Oct. 20.
On Aug. 11, city officials disclosed plans to move the Sisson Street transfer station to 2801 Falls Road, where the Potts and Callahan construction company owns a storage yard that it has offered to lease to the city. That plan has drawn strong opposition from individuals and organization leaders who say the property is in a floodplain and less than 150 feet from the Jones Falls waterway. Opponents say it would be wrong to use the land as a transfer station because trash could end up washing into the Jones Falls and Baltimore’s harbor. Others say it would potentially ruin a picturesque stretch of the Jones Falls Valley and hurt businesses there.
‘We heard you’
On Wednesday, Scott announced that he will form a task force to look at all possible options for disposing of bulk trash and hazardous waste materials now brought to the Sisson Street facility. The task force will include City Council members, community stakeholders and city officials. Scott said he wants it to “consider all options for the future of the transfer station, including keeping it where it is, moving it or simply closing it,” and he wants to get its recommendations by December.
Formation of the task force is a sign that the mayor and other elected officials have heard the community’s concerns about the Falls Road plan, Ramos said at the Hampden meeting.
“The mayor has heard everybody,” she told the audience. “We heard you…We want to make sure that we do this right and we consider all options and figure out what the next steps are.”
With the task force, “everything is on the table,” Ramos said. “To figure out whether to move it, to leave it, to improve it, to do nothing and have nothing there. Those are all things that are now being considered.”
More than 75 people came to Thursday’s meeting at the Roosevelt Recreation Center, and others participated virtually. In addition to council members Ramos and Torrence, speakers included Deputy Mayor for Operations Khalid Zaied; HCC president Thomas Akras; Friends of the Jones Falls President Sandra Sparks; Friends of the Jones Falls board member and planning consultant Al Barry, and developer David Tufaro of Terra Nova Ventures. Participants came from many different neighborhoods, including Guilford, Mount Vernon, Hoes Heights, Charles Village and ‘Hamrol,’ the area between Hampden and Roland Park.
No votes were taken. For the bulk of the 90-minute meeting, participants were given a chance to ask questions about the transfer station plans and share their views about the idea of using the Falls Road property. No audience members expressed support for moving the transfer station to Falls Road. There was a side discussion about the definition of a dump.
Ramos and Zaied both said they mostly just wanted to hear what city residents think. “We’re here today to listen,” Zaied said.
‘We don’t think big’
Numerous speakers bashed the idea of moving the transfer station to Falls Road, saying they thought it would be inconsistent with a long-range vision to make that stretch of the Jones Falls Valley more of a civic amenity with nature trails, jogging paths and expanded grounds for the Baltimore Streetcar Museum at 1901 Falls Road.
Clarinda Harriss of Guilford pointed to other cities that celebrate their urban waterways, including London, Paris and Amsterdam.
“Why is the Jones Falls not a huge, long-term, civic priority?” she asked.
Barry said the Friends of the Jones Falls has received a $140,000 grant to develop a strategic plan for the Jones Falls Valley watershed. “We have an opportunity here to do a legacy project,” he said.
Hoes Heights resident Katie Kelley said she thinks the Falls Road proposal shows a lack of vision on the city’s part.
“This is a bigger issue to me, as a Baltimorean,” she said. “We don’t think big. We don’t think long-term in this city. We think about short-term and we think about little problems that can be solved in the moment and we don’t have vision. I think that with this project, we need to have vision. We need to understand that what they are doing at The Friends of the Jones Falls is the future of our city.
“If we want to have a green city, if we want to have a healthy, sustainable city, if we want to be a city that other cities look to and say, ‘oh my God, we need to do what Baltimore’s doing,’ it is not putting a whatever-you-call-it – transfer site, recycling site, whatever you want to call it – not putting that on a watershed that is just starting to recover,” Kelley continued. “We have herons down there. We have otters playing in the Jones Falls. It is just starting to come back, and we’re going to do this? We’re shooting ourselves in the foot again. I’ve watched Baltimore do this for 46 years of my life, and I just don’t want to see us do this again. We need to have some vision and understand that our future is not this.”
As far as the city’s budgetary constraints go, Kelley said, “when you’re talking about how little money we have to spend and how we have to make these really hard decisions, it seems like it makes a lot more sense to redo our existing facility and not spend money moving it a whole new place.”
Public referendum
No one suggested that the city acquire the land from Potts and Callahan for uses more consistent with the nature-oriented vision put forth by the Friends of the Jones Falls. But Mount Vernon resident Sara D’Adamo suggested that the city consider putting a public referendum on the ballot to protect and improve that stretch of the Jones Falls Valley. She said the Baltimore Social-Environmental Collaborative could be a valuable resource.
Artist and curator Catherine Borg said she’s against the Falls Road option: “It’s just the wrong place.”
Tufaro, the developer behind the Mill No. 1 and Whitehall Mill apartments along the Jones Falls, said his company and his tenants were never consulted about the city’s plan to move the transfer station to Falls Road before the Aug. 11 meeting.
“We should never have gotten to this point,” he said. “I can’t believe that they didn’t talk to us.”
A man from the audience suggested changing the zoning of the Potts and Callahan property to prevent future industrial uses that would be inconsistent with plans for an uninterrupted greenway. “Why isn’t there a motion being put forward to get that area rezoned?” he asked.
Torrence said that would be spot zoning, which the city doesn’t allow, but the area could possibly be rezoned as part of a comprehensive rezoning effort.
Dumpster days
A woman in the audience asked why the city couldn’t have more “community dumpster days” and other pop-up bulk trash collection events around the city instead of a permanent location.
Torrence said the city’s ability to rely on temporary sites is limited in part because of the shortage of drivers to haul away the dumpsters. With drivers for Walmart and FedEx earning upwards of $100,000 a year, he said, it’s increasingly difficult for the city to find and hire drivers to take dumpsters out into the neighborhoods.
“Right now we are extremely booked on the community dumpster days,” he said. “I think they were booked in January for the entire year…We’re struggling…When you have Walmart offering somewhere around $100,000 a year for a five-day a week schedule, you have FedEx paying drivers $180,000 a year…that means that we have to be competitive.”
Sparks, who heads the Friends of the Jones Falls group, said she believes the city needs to replace the Sisson Street facility if it moves, not just have short-term collection events.
“We absolutely need a transfer site,” she said. “We cannot do without one. So, any thoughts of just not having one? Nope. We’ve got to have one. The beauty of where we are is that we are in the center of the city. We can serve people east, west, north, south. We need to find a place in this corridor that will work. We’re dedicated to finding a good place for the transfer center.”
Hampden resident Agatha So suggested that the mayor create two task forces – one to focus on the future of the Sisson Street transfer station and one to focus on the future of the Jones Falls Valley.
A dump or not a dump?
There was some disagreement at the meeting about what a dump is and isn’t.
Ramos told the audience it’s not accurate to call the Sisson Street property a dump. She said it should be called a transfer station because the bulk trash brought there is transferred to other locations rather than staying in place like the trash brought to the Quarantine Road landfill in south Baltimore.
“It’s not a dump,” she said, “It’s a transfer station.”
“It’s a transfer station,” Zaied agreed. “What that means is, [trash] doesn’t stay there. It’s not like a landfill…It’s a transfer station, but it’s not a dump.”
But Lower West Hampden resident Edward Weiss said he looked up the definition of a dump and believes it applies to the Sisson Street property.
Weiss said the dictionary defines a dump as “a site for depositing garbage.” Under that definition, he said, a transfer station is a dump.
“It’s a revolving dump,” he said. “The trash doesn’t stay there, but it’s there all day…It’s literally a dump.”
