City council, Tuesday night, threw its support behind a Boulder County-owned composting facility and urged the county commissioners to collaborate with Longmont in finding a site for the plant.
The council unanimously voted to send a letter to the commissioners backing the compost center without comment. The letter was reworked after council members, earlier this month, said it should include a sentence asking the commissioners to partner with Longmont and other municipalities in securing a parcel to build the facility.
A landowner suing the county over its original plan, to place the compost plant near her horse farm blasted the city council for supporting the county. Nancy Davis told the council that the county brushed aside its own conservation easement to use public funds to buy the Rainbow Nursery site south of Longmont to build an industrial-sized compost facility.
The compost center would accept truckloads of sewage sludge and destroy the local environment, Davis told the council during a public invited-to-be-heard segment.
“Your fawning letter to the county is cruel and dismissive to me and my family as well as the entire town of Erie and many others in east Boulder County,” Davis said. “It discounts the many people throughout Boulder County and beyond who trusted our local government to keep its promises about Open Space, conservation easements and taxes.”
“I’m surprised you aren’t embarrassed to add your endorsement to a project that has already been discredited and withdrawn,” Davis said.
Plans to build the compost center on the abandoned Rainbow Nursery site were scuttled over objections from nearby property owners. The compost project is now on hold as county planners look at several factors impacting its site and construction, county officials said.
The Rainbow Nursery proposal drew two lawsuits, one of which was dismissed by a district judge earlier this month. Davis’ lawsuit is still pending and includes different arguments than the original and first lawsuit, she said in an email.
Davis — in a separate email — said Longmont includes people who are robotically ‘’green” who don’t think critically about the environment or science.
“We have a Longmont address (unincorporated), our son lives in Longmont and we spend a fair amount of time there,” Davis said. “It’s been very upsetting to see how backwards Longmont has been on this issue.”
The council’s letter states nearly 100,000 tons per year of organic material from Boulder County is put in landfills and the material set aside for composting is sent to Keenesburg in Weld County.
Both practices boost greenhouse gas emissions. “A publicly owned and operated facility could be a game-changer for the county and its municipal partners,” the letter states.
