The Sisson Street Task Force heard an earful during a three-hour meeting convened on Monday to help Mayor Brandon Scott decide where to move a bulk trash drop-off facility in Remington to make way for a grocery store-anchored commercial center — or whether to move it at all.
Approximately three dozen people spoke either in person or virtually to the 13-member panel that Scott formed to recommend the best way for the city to handle bulk trash and hazardous waste disposal if the Department of Public Works (DPW) closes the Sisson Street Sanitation Yard and Citizen Drop-Off Center at 2840-2842 Sisson Street.
Monday’s meeting started at 6:30 p.m. in City Hall and went past 9 p.m. It was the second of six scheduled for the task force and the first at which members of the general public were allowed to give testimony. Eleven of the task force members were at the meeting in City Hall and the other two were listening online. Several dozen people attended the meeting in City Council chambers and 24 spoke to the commission there. More than 50 people attended virtually, and more than a dozen spoke to the commission that way.
Public officials say they’re exploring plans to move the Sisson Street facility because the city has received a proposal to redevelop that property for commercial use if the drop-off center can be relocated. Seawall Development, the likely buyer, has proposed building a grocery store-anchored commercial center on the property but hasn’t disclosed who the operator would be or made its plans public. To do so would violate the terms of a 2024 Request for Proposals issued by the Baltimore Development Corp., the quasi-public agency that is leading the developer-selection process for the city.
In August, city officials proposed moving the drop-off center to a storage yard at 2801 Falls Road that’s owned by the Potts & Callahan construction company. The proposal drew widespread opposition because the land is in a floodplain and located along a picturesque stretch of the Jones Falls Valley. Opponents urged city officials to come up with the better solution and the mayor responded by forming the task force.
The mayor has said he wants the task force to consider all options for the future of the Sisson Street facility: including keeping it where it is, moving it or simply closing it. He said in September that he’d like to receive the task force’s recommendations by December.
Before taking public testimony, the panel was briefed by DPW director Matthew Garbark about the Sisson Street parcel and six sites that city officials have considered as possible places to relocate the drop off center – the Potts & Callahan yard on Falls Road and five others – and discussed the pros and cons of each.
Speakers were then given two minutes each to address the panel, and Baltimore City Council member Odette Ramos, the task force chair, held them to it.
The speakers came from many different neighborhoods, indicating that the topic has become a citywide issue, and approached the subject from a number of directions.
Some responded to the six site options that Garbark outlined, saying which they preferred. Others said they’d prefer to see the drop-off center stay where it is and asked why city officials would want to fix something that they think isn’t broken. At least one suggested a location that Garbark didn’t mention. Others bashed Seawall for not being more communicative.
‘Three more Mr. Trash Wheels‘
By far the greatest number of speakers used their time to express strong opposition to the 2801 Falls Road proposal. Some said the best option would be to leave the facility where it is, and others said they’d be open to another site. But not one citizen spoke in favor of moving the drop-off facility to Falls Road so the land could be sold to a developer. More than a few suggested that any property close to the Jones Falls waterway or in a floodplain should be ruled out of consideration.
Reservoir Hill resident Daniel Dykes said it doesn’t take an adult to know that “you don’t put a dump next to a stream.” He said he works in Baltimore City public schools and has talked to middle schoolers who can see that it would be an environmental disaster waiting to happen.
“I had literal fourth and fifth graders tell me, ‘Bruh, that plan is cooked,’ in their words,” he told the panel. “You can giggle about it all you want, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that this is a terrible idea.”
Dykes said he was working in Ellicott City during the 2018 flood there.
“I watched 20 cars be washed away within 10 minutes, and that will happen again,” he warned. “There’s a Category 5 hurricane in the Gulf right now. If we get rainfall like that, it will flood again. If you put a dump there, that’s all going to end up in the harbor, and you’re going to have to have three more Mr. Trash Wheels just to clean that sh*t up.”
Dykes said Falls Road is already crumbling.
“There are sinkholes that are waiting to sink at any moment,” he said. “If I had a quarter for the amount of times I have almost died cycling on that road already, I’d probably have just enough to pay for the parking that I had to do to get in here, which is 15 bucks, which is ridiculous and prevents a lot of actual public participation.”
He also questioned the make-up of the task force, which includes five representatives from city government and eight representatives of community groups.
“There’s not one environmental or water quality expert between none of y’all, which I would think would be required for a task force,” he said.
Emma Dunbar of Bolton Hill said putting a trash facility near a public waterway is what cities did 200 years ago.
When she heard that’s what Baltimore was proposing for the Jones Falls Valley, she said, “I thought I had woken up in the 1800s.”
‘Jones Falls Park’
Several speakers had other uses in mind for the 4.3-acre Potts & Callahan property.
Instead of a bulk trash drop-off center, said Bolton Hill resident Dick Williams, he’d like to see it turned into a public amenity – the “Jones Falls Park.”
Charles Village resident Ren Dodge noted that the Potts & Callahan site is in the floodplain of a second waterway, Stony Run, which is already the focus of community restoration efforts.
“We could expand those restoration efforts by daylighting Stony Run” where the Potts & Callahan site is located, he said. It “would be the centerpiece of this Jones Falls Park that is in a lot of people’s minds.”
Hampden resident Jacob Taswell suggested the area could be a greenway comparable to the Capital Crescent Trail, a seven-mile shared use rail trail that runs from Georgetown in Washington, D. C., to Bethesda, Maryland.
“It has huge potential to be a recreational asset, a natural ecological asset and a cultural asset, because of the presence of the streetcar museum and then the historic mills farther up Falls Road,” he said. “I think we really ought to be thinking big picture here, about how amazing this could be for our city if we were to create a greenway and a cultural corridor that would connect the Station North Arts district to the mills, the artist studios, the galleries and art collectives in Hampden and Woodberry.”
He urged city officials not to be short-sighted in thinking about the possibilities for the Jones Falls Valley. “The way that we’re looking at these sites from such a zoomed-in scale ought to be rethought entirely and we should be zooming out to really understand the larger urban context that we’re talking about with this issue.”
Lee Davis, Co-Executive Director of the Center for Creative Impact at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), also expressed his “deep opposition” to the plan to move the drop-off facility to Falls Road and his support for making the Potts & Callahan parcel part of a larger recreational and ecological asset for the city.
“As many of you may know, MICA’s campus quite literally goes across the Jones Falls and our 200-year history is very much intertwined with that of the watershed,” Davis said. “We are working very hard as a college with a real deep commitment to the Jones Falls as a part of our campus and a part of our ecosystem.”
When city officials first unveiled their proposal to move the drop-off facility to the Jones Falls Valley, “it kind of felt like the carpet had been pulled out from beneath all of us,” he continued.
“There are many, many organizations and people and institutions who are committing hours and hours of time and deep investment and resources to creating this incredible green resource. It should be our Central Park. It should be our High Line. It can be. And it’s a lack of vision, I think, that has resulted in us even having this conversation…As a college committed to vision and creativity, we can do better than this. We stand as a resource to help to hopefully enliven that creative thinking.”
‘Massive dumping‘
Ellen O’Brien, a city resident for 31 years, said she’d prefer not to see the Sisson Street site moved. “I want you to leave it where it is.” But if city officials really want to move it she said, she suggests that they consider the former Roland Patterson School property on Greenspring Avenue between Cold Spring Lane and Northern Parkway.
Either way, she said, she believes moving the drop-off center to Falls Road would be “so wrong on so many levels because it is in a floodplain and any environmental regulations will prevent that from happening – unless you’re going to follow Donald Trump [and] the fact that he’s thrown away the whole EPA regulations. I urge you not to put it there…It’s a potential greenway now.”
O’Brien also warned the task force that closing the drop-off center and not replacing it would be a bad idea. “I don’t want it to go away,” she said. “Otherwise, there will be massive dumping throughout the city.”
Charles Village resident Charles Baker is also against the Falls Road site, saying it would be “more difficult to get to” than the current location. In choosing an alternate drop-site, he said, city officials ought to take into consideration the time it will take for residents and home renovators to get to it and how that will affect the costs of any home renovation project.
Because people use the drop-off center to dispose of construction materials and other debris left over from renovation projects, he said, the Sisson Street facility is of “tremendous value to the community” because of its convenient location.
“When I first moved into my house, I could do a lot of my own renovation. I couldn’t really afford to pay someone to do it. So I was able to use the facility to drop off construction materials and therefore improve my house and improve the neighborhood as a result. If you think about any contractor that comes to your house, any renovation that is done and the speed at which they can go and deliver whatever debris is leftover during demolition, actually lowers the cost.”
The Sisson Street facility is convenient because “it’s right there on [Interstate] 83” and “you come off and you don’t have to drive through the neighborhood. It actually is lowering the overall renovation costs for lots of people in the city. Falls Road is not at all centrally located. It’s very difficult to get to…You really should be thinking about this as a tremendous resource, that the city is giving help to homeowners and those who are renovating houses, as a way to lower their costs to improve the city.”
Cathedral Street resident Piers Duffell brought up the potential impact on cyclists who ride on Falls Road and warned that moving the drop-off facility to the Potts & Callahan property could bring 300 more trucks to the area every weekend.
“That would put a lot of cyclists in a lot of danger,” he said. “The city is actually trying to improve bike infrastructure and reduce fatalities… This feels like several steps backward.”
Bernardo Vigil, one of the owners of Baltimore Bicycle Works at 1813 Falls Road, said he’s against moving the drop-off facility to the Jones Falls Valley for both ecological and business reasons.
“Having owned a business on the Falls for over a decade, I know firsthand that this area is not just in a theoretical floodplain. It floods, multiple times a year,” he said. “The Falls already has problems with sewage overflow, and I don’t think we need to add trash to the equation, especially because I do frequently see kids and teenagers go down and wade in the water, ill-advised as that may be.”
Moving the facility to Falls Road would also be “extremely harmful to my business,” he said. “The increased truck traffic would make access to our shop much more dangerous by bike and much more inconvenient by car. I’m concerned about having dump trucks and debris from dump trucks around people biking, especially at night…Adding trucks and the bits of metal and glass that they would inevitably drop would be a safety issue for everyone involved.”
‘Burden of persuasion’
Calvert Street resident Evan Bowen said he thinks it’s all being done for Seawall and its proposed development.
“Yes, it’s nice to have redevelopment within the neighborhood, but it does not seem to be really for people that live within the city, the people that live within the community,” he said. “I think the [proposed] area on Falls is just a terrible spot…It would be extremely dangerous for all of the residents…I think it is a major step backwards in terms of trying to preserve the city’s ecosystem, trying to preserve the beauty of the city.”
Anthony Fortenos of Stone Hill said he believes Seawall needs to make a case for why it wants to displace the current drop-off facility. “The burden of persuasion here belongs to Seawall,” he said. “Seawall needs to make a case and Seawall is AWOL. Seawall is AWOL from all these meetings. They’re not showing up.”
If Seawall made a strong case to show why it absolutely needs to buy the city’s land when it already owns a number of developable properties in Remington, “I’d be open to listening,” he said. “But they’re not here. No one is making that case…You have to make a very strong case to give away a public good.”
Stone Hill resident Andrew Van Styn said the Sisson Street controversy reminds him of the way city officials changed zoning to enable a private company to develop public parkland at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.
“I think we are beginning a very bad tradition in Baltimore where the city is selling its patrimony, its natural patrimony, to private developers,” he said. “I don’t think we would be here if it weren’t for the fact that a large development doesn’t want to have a trash dump in their viewshed, and that sets a very, very bad precedent.”
Van Styn said he thought that most of the objections people have with alternate sites are surmountable and could be addressed with good design. “It really troubles me that, after the Inner Harbor, this is another instance of something that is irreplaceable being sold to local developers to make their life easy or better for them.”
Dykes said the city’s efforts to relocate the drop-off center for a developer don’t seem justified to him.
“Whether or not they want to put another mediocre milquetoast food court there or whatever idea they want to put there, it is not worth it,” he said. “The herons and the kingfishers and the box turtles and the foxes, they cannot speak for themselves. But water is life and you all need water. We all need water. If you continue to…put trash wherever you need that water, then you will reap what you sow…Don’t put a dump next to a stream for God’s sake.”
Six sites
In addition to the Potts & Callahan property at 2801 Falls Road, the sites that Garbark discussed were: a “closed landfill” at Monument and Edison streets; the “Camp Small” area west of the Jones Falls Expressway; 560 W. North Avenue, near where a large salt dome is visible from the Jones Falls Expressway; 400 W. North Ave.; and a large open area near Howard and 25th streets.
In each case, Garbark said, the sites had pros and cons. He said his office or other city departments could provide more information about any of them if the task force wanted. He said city officials would consider both leasing and buying land for a relocation site – “either would work for us, we’ll make whatever works, work” – but buying outright “would be more expensive upfront.”
Task force members seemed to have the most questions about the site at 25th and Howard streets, which is owned by Seawall and leased to the State of Maryland’s Mass Transit Administration as a bus depot and bus transfer station. It was once proposed as a site for a shopping center anchored by a branch of Walmart. Task force members said they don’t see many buses parked there and wondered if the State of Maryland could be persuaded to terminate its lease if that were the biggest obstacle to using that parcel as a relocation site.
The task force members will be sworn in at City Hall on Nov. 3 at 11:30 a.m. Their next meetings have been set for Nov. 10 and 24 and Dec. 8 and 22. Ramos said the panel will talk about the pros and cons of all six sites but will not take public testimony at its Nov. 10 meeting. She promised that the task force will take more public testimony at a future meeting, once members come up with some potential recommendations to talk about, and that experts in various relevant fields will be invited to talk with the panel. She said the time and place for the Nov. 10 meeting will be announced as soon as it is finalized.
Ramos said after Monday’s meeting that she didn’t know how many people would want to testify and is grateful to those who did. “I thought this was a good opportunity for them to let us know what they thought,” she said. “I appreciate everybody for coming out.”
Good article, ed!!thx!!
One of the most infuriating thing in this situation is that the Baltimore Development Corp (BDC), a taxpayer -funded entity, is allowed (encouraged?) to enforce secrecy in backroom deals like this. Why can’t the public see the proposals? Where is Seawall in the discussion?