An aerial view of the paper outflow pile at the CSWD’s recycling facility in Williston. The conveyor in the background carries all the unsorted material that is dumped in a small room with green corrugated siding. Workers in that room pull out trash, plastic bags, filmy wrap, etc. Courtesy photoThis story by Jason Starr was first published in The Williston Observer on Dec. 12The Chittenden Solid Waste District is abandoning its plan to build a new recycling center on Redmond Road in Williston after a summer walk-through of its 27-acre parcel found newly formed wetlands.It was a different assessment than in 2020, when the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources first surveyed the property with drought conditions persisting in the area. Believing it had a buildable parcel, the district garnered voter support for a $22 million bond in 2022 and later received a permit for the project from the Williston Development Review Board.But two summers of heavy rainfall have changed the complexion of the site, saturating the soil and establishing wetland vegetation, according to Vermont Agency of Natural Resources inspectors as well as a wetland consultant hired by the district.“We experienced record rainfall over the last couple of years, which severely impacted the quality of the land,” the district wrote in an October newsletter. “It now qualifies as primarily a wetland community … We made the decision to leave the parcel undisturbed.”CSWD Executive Director Sarah Reeves is working with district’s board of directors to find an alternative location, a setback that will push the project completion back at least a year until mid-2026, she estimates. The recycling center is designed to replace the existing center off Industrial Road in Williston. It will be built to handle nearly 50 percent more material and implement automated sorting in place of the hand-sorting that currently happens at the center. The current center accepts recyclables from residential and commercial waste haulers throughout Chittenden County. Material also comes in from other counties, Reeves said.“Our board remains strongly committed to the materials recycling facility, and we are so appreciative that the voters of Chittenden County strongly supported the bond,” Reeves said. “We value that trust from our community, and we are committed to this project. It’s going to be an amazing facility once it is constructed.”READ MORE The district needs at least 10 acres of industrially zoned property, Reeves said, ideally centrally located in the county. It prefers vacant land over retrofitting an existing structure. A parcel with those criteria has proven difficult to find since the search began in September.“There’s not a lot of industrial zoned land available,” Reeves said. “We are still on the hunt for that.”The budget for the project was already ballooning over costs anticipated when voters approved the $22 million bond — so much so that district leaders scaled back the project scope earlier this year, reducing the size of the building and access road, among other cuts. Now, the district will be forced to add land acquisition to the budget.But Reeves believes, if the district can find a construction-ready lot, with a road and utilities already in place, that construction costs could be reduced from the Redmond Road site, and items cut from the project could be added back in.“There’s a lot of benefits to being able to be in an industrial park,” she said. “So even with needing to purchase property, it could be offset by reduced land development costs.”The district serves 18 Chittenden County municipalities, governed by a board of directors with representation from each. Its current recycling facility, which is operated under an “open-ended” contract with Casella Waste Systems, “continues to plug along,” Reeves wrote in a July memo to the board. “However, the longer we remain in operation in the current (recycling center), the greater the investment in upkeep for the old equipment and the greater the risk of catastrophic failure of critical components.”Read the story on VTDigger here: CSWD seeks new recycle center site.