City council Tuesday night will consider throwing its weight behind the construction of a county-wide composting plant, saying the facility will help achieve laudable environmental goals including reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Council members are just not saying where they want the composting center to be built.
The council will vote on sending a letter to the Boulder County Commissioners supporting the building of a composting facility at the 7 p.m. council meeting.
“We applaud Boulder County’s diligence in trying to identify a suitable location for a composting facility,” the letter states. “This is an important endeavor and one that the Longmont City Council supports wholeheartedly.”
The letter does not mention that a bid to build a county-owner composting plant at the site of the former Rainbow Nursery has been shelved. The county commissioners earlier this month unanimously approved pulling the application for the project.
The commissioners’ action came after two lawsuits were filed by nearby landowners who targeted the Rainbow Nursery site.
The lawsuits claim the county used sales and use tax revenue to pay $170,000 to create a conservation easement for the parcel because it was prime agricultural land. The county then used the “right of first purchase” to buy the property in 2018 to convert it into an industrial-scale composting facility and that the protections offered under the conservation easement no longer exist.
Rob O’Dea, spokesperson for Protect Rainbow Open Space, has told The Leader that the issue lies in maintaining the integrity of open spaces and conservation easements. The county, by setting aside the Rainbow site to protect it from development and then building on the parcel, was guilty of a “classic bait and switch,” O’Dea told The Leader.
The letter from the city council states that regional collaboration on a composting facility is imperative to the goal of composting waste locally. Nearly 100,000 tons per year of organic material from Boulder County is landfilled and the materials that are collected for composting are hauled to Keenesburg in Weld County, the letter states.
Both practices contribute significantly to green-house gas emissions, the letter states.
“That also comes with the missed opportunity to enhance carbon sequestration in the county overall which has many co-benefits to achieve over-arching county climate goals such as greenhouse gas reduction, improved soil health, improved crop yields, increase water retention, and restoration of native plant and animal species,” the letter states.
