Flow Control Start Date Could Be Moved

The city’s plan to take over garbage collection in a project known as “flow control” could be postponed.

An item on Tuesday’s City Council agenda proposes changing the date that project begins.

Starting Sept. 1, the city was planning on taking over trash collection, sending waste to city-owned landfills rather than the privately owned Camino Real Landfill in Sunland Park. The decision, made in December of last year, caused a waste company contracted by the city to sue for breach of contract.

The turn of events caused the city’s Environmental Services Department to propose postponing the start date three years. Ellen Smyth, head of the department, had told ABC-7 that delaying flow control would allow the city time to work with Fort Bliss on a project to turn waste into energy.

“You burn (garbage) hot and clean, so there’s no air emissions,” Smyth explained in an interview in December 2010. “You take that energy from the heat, and your produce steam, so you have a steam generator which turns a turbine and then it generates the electricity.”

Smyth said the waste-to-energy project would benefit more than just the two entities involved.

“We want the (energy) rates to go down or at least stay the same,” Smyth said in December. “To be able to not build a new landfill in McCombs or Clint, that would be a good thing for the environment.”

City Council is expected to take up the postponement during its meeting Tuesday morning. Stay with ABC-7 for any developments.