For Fee, Columbus Will Take Trash
Mayor Dana Rinehart offered Friday to accept 3,100 tons of New York garbage that has been rejected by six states and three nations and reduce it to ashes in the state capital’s trash-burning power plant.
But the mayor’s offer was contingent on a payment of nearly $1 million and approval from environmental authorities, neither of which appeared likely.
“We normally operate at below capacity . . . but that’s not the reason that we did this,” Rinehart said in an interview. The mayor said he made his offer because the garbage had become an “international embarrassment.”
The barge, anchored in New York Harbor, began its trip on March 22. It has been rejected by North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and Florida, and by Mexico, Belize and the Bahamas.
No settlement has been reached on where the trash will wind up.
Rinehart said he sent a telegram to Frank Jones, city supervisor in Islip, N.Y., where the trash’s odyssey began. The mayor offered to burn the garbage for $300 a ton, several times the $14 to $15 a ton the city usually gets for burning trash, for a total of $930,000.
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