Dear Friends,
Tuesday is election day! If you have a mail-in ballot, I’d recommend you drop it in one of the boxes set up by the Board of Elections rather than in the US mail (but you can put it in the US mail if it is postmarked-not mailed-by November 3.) If early vote is any indication, there will be higher turnout than four years ago. You can find the location of the boxes here.
It looks like the number of people voting will increase significantly, if we go by the totals from early voting where the numbers increased by 55% from four years ago.
You can text the word “BOX” and your zip code to 77788 to identify where to vote on Election Day.
Closing the Incinerator Helps Move the County Towards Zero Waste
The County Council held its third work session this week on options for solid waste disposal. Council is scheduled to vote on two resolutions on Tuesday, Nov. 10, presenting the decision as a choice between keeping the incinerator open for the long term and closing it, sending our waste to out-of-state landfills.
Unfortunately, these resolutions do not accurately reflect the two choices before the Council.
To begin with, both choices include sending waste to out-of-state landfills. Currently, with the incinerator in operation, we send 25-30% of the County’s waste to an out-of-state landfill located in a low-income, minority community.
Second, the resolution for closing the incinerator (RRF) omits what else becomes possible when the RRF is closed. If it were to remain open, it needs either a major upgrade or a complete rebuild by 2031. This will cost a minimum of $356 million, according to an estimate from a consultant.
There are better ways to use that much money.
We could-and should-move toward advanced waste processing (AWP), which is the name used for different processes that recover as much as possible from the trash and instead send it toward recycling, composting, or some other reuse.
Some have said that AWP doesn’t exist, but it does. I have visited these types of processing facilities using the kind of technology that’s already available to execute advanced waste processing.
One of the facilities I visited, GreenWaste in San Jose, California, recycles on-site and recovers up to 75% of the mixed solid waste (trash) on its tipping floor. 75%! If we did that, the amount of trash we’d send to a landfill would be less than what we send right now.
Here’s its website. You can watch the video, which explains how the trash goes through multiple sorters, some with AI pickers, some that sort by weight (the light parts float), some that sort by size (the smallest drop through screens), and some that sort by magnets. There are people in a few places who also provide additional quality control. (And it is important to note that they have separate recycling pick-up, so they are working with trash compositions similar to ours.)
At Sevier Solid Waste in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, they’re using different technology with rotary drums that transform bags of trash into a dirt-like material with metal and plastics pulled out and the remainder made into compost. The trash is inside the rotary drums turning for three days.
Here are some photos from my visit to Sevier Solid Waste. I was taken through the entire process starting with trash bags fed into the rotary drums.
Here’s another example. In Portsmouth, they awarded a contract for a facility that will recycle 50% of the waste, that was Portsmouth’s request, but not the technological limit of the facility’s capacity. So, I have no doubt that it is possible to have a facility built here that could separate out at least 50% for recycling and reuse, and probably more.
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Two of the facilities I visited had organic digesters that produced compost and methane. One used methane to power electric turbines, and the other used it to power its trash trucks.
So, you can see, various technologies exist to drastically reduce our trash and instead recycle it. These technologies can help move us away from being a throwaway society. These are two different options, and there are more.
That is why we issued a request for proposals (RFP) to implement an advanced waste processing system. The deadline for submissions has closed, and now the proposals are being reviewed as part of the RFP process. Once they are available for review, it will give everyone a better sense of the breadth of what is possible.
This is what we should be doing, and yet, we cannot do this, financially, if the incinerator stays open because, as I said earlier, for it to stay open will cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
As I’ve shown above, advanced waste processing helps greatly reduce trash. We can also continue and improve our efforts upfront to reduce the trash. We can reduce the trash we generate as was done with the ban on single-use plastic bags. We can increase the work we are doing at the Shady Grove Transfer Station, where we recycle mattresses, electronics, textiles, and more. We can better educate and improve recycling in single-family homes, apartments, and businesses.
We can implement countywide composting. We have not done this yet because we do not have a place to take our food scraps. If the incinerator is closed, we will be able to take them to our leaf compost facility in Dickerson. We can accommodate the food scraps quickly and relatively inexpensively. Why have we not done that already? Because the County has a longstanding, legally binding agreement with the Sugarloaf Citizens Association that does not allow food scraps processing until we close the incinerator.
I want to make a few more points.
First, an informed decision requires more than hearing from the people who operate the incinerator. Reworld was invited to present to the Council, with no comparably visible presentation of competing waste-reduction and recovery technologies and no opportunity to respond to the proposal.
Reworld’s technical expertise in operations was relevant, and the company should have been there to answer questions. Reworld owns and operates incinerators around the country and the world. Its goal is to ensure its incinerators remain operational and that new ones are built.
If the Council is considering a generational change in waste infrastructure, why should the current incinerator operator’s perspective have such prominence without comparable technical and financial presentations from alternative providers? There are qualified companies offering advanced materials recovery, rotary drum processing, organics recycling, composting, anaerobic digestion, and integrated waste management systems. If there are to be presentations, they must be comprehensive and show what is possible.
My next point: transportation to landfills.
Right now, as I wrote earlier, we are sending our ash (about 30% by volume of our trash) to a landfill by train to a very low-income, minority community. We have heard from the NAACP there, and they would like us to stop taking our ash there, and I think the majority of the Council agrees that we should not continue dumping ash on the community. There are many other landfills with available space that are not near poor, minority communities. In the short term, the trash would likely have to go by truck, but it eventually could go by rail. And even keeping the incinerator open would require long-distance hauling during the facility’s major refurbishment or rebuild.
So, I urge the Council to pass the resolution to close the incinerator and transition to a better path that leads us away from being a throwaway society. If Councilmembers are not ready to do that, then I’d ask them to do more research: wait to hear what is possible from our request for proposals and seek advice from experts other than the current incinerator operator.
We should not make the wrong decision simply because we feel that not enough is known. There is no deadline other than the one Council President Natali Fani-González imposed arbitrarily. It is time to close the incinerator and move toward the practices and technologies that embody our ideals of zero waste.
Time to Act on Census Rule Changes
This week, County leaders took a stand and asked the U.S. Census Bureau to withdraw its proposed rule that would alter who is counted in the 2030 Census.
Watch the press conference here.
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I want to thank my team for their work submitting public comment on these changes and the Council President’s support, so we are speaking with one voice. You can find a link to our submission for public comment on the County Executive’s webpage.
It should be unthinkable for the federal government to decide which of our residents are counted, but here we are. Simply put, it’s outrageous.
The Constitution says to count every person. It doesn’t say count only the people the administration wants to count. In Montgomery County, one in three residents was born outside the United States, and one in seven is not a U.S. citizen. Under this rule, a lot of them would be left out: students, workers here on visas, DACA recipients, TPS holders, kids sitting in our classrooms.
And that’s only the start. This rule rewrites the census from top to bottom. It counts people where tax records say they were, not where they actually live. It throws out the rules for counting people in nursing homes, shelters, foster care, and college housing. It uses immigration records to decide who counts.
You can draw a clear line between these changes and Trump’s history of race-baiting. It takes race and ethnicity off the census for the first time since 1790. That isn’t being color blind. It’s choosing not to look. It bars questions on sexual orientation. Even when there were severe restrictions on who could vote, those people were still counted. These changes would lock this bigotry into federal regulation. Any one of these changes would take years to test. Doing all of them at once is reckless.
Here’s what it costs us. Leaving people out doesn’t change who lives here. It just means less money for the next 10 years to serve the same people. Maryland gets $49 billion a year in federal programs that rely on census counts, for health care, schools, roads, and housing. When those dollars shrink, local taxpayers will be forced to make up the difference.
There’s also the matter of trust. In 2020, 78% of our households responded to the Census, which took years of building relationships with immigrant communities. This rule would undo that work.
So, our message to the Census Bureau is simple: withdraw this rule, give the public more time, and do your job. Count everyone, once, and in the right place.
Comments are due Monday, Nov. 2, but we are asking the Census Bureau to extend the deadline to Dec. 10, 2026. Residents and organizations can submit comments at regulations.gov under Docket USBC-2026-0628 or follow the prompt in the QR code above. I encourage you to share your viewpoint.
Halloween Fun and Daylight Saving Time Ends
We’ve got two big things happening this weekend: Halloween and the end of Daylight Saving Time, giving us all an extra hour.
I want to reiterate this message from our Department of Transportation and remind everyone who uses the road to be careful, especially on Saturday night, when we’ll have lots of kids running around trick-or-treating. Drivers should plan to drive more slowly than usual through neighborhoods and stay off their phones. Walkers should use crosswalks and traffic signals to cross the street safely.
All parents should remember that trick-or-treaters should wear a reflective vest, add reflective tape to their costumes, or have glow sticks and lights handy so groups are more visible. Long, trailing fabric is discouraged. It can be a tripping hazard, or the fabric could catch fire if it gets too close to jack-o’-lanterns lit with candles. Firefighters suggest using battery-operated candles rather than traditional ones near your home or in areas with heavy foot traffic.
We turn the clocks back one hour on Sunday as Daylight Saving Time ends. To ease the transition, make sure you adjust your schedule, so you still get 7 to 9 hours of rest per night. Light helps increase serotonin in the brain, which helps you wake up naturally in the morning. With the sun rising earlier in the morning and setting earlier in the evening, you will need to plan ahead to get outside and enjoy a walk. A final reminder is the sun will set on Sunday an hour earlier, at 5:05 p.m., so be extra cautious driving or walking in the early evening.
Montgomery County Fire Rescue Service recommends you use the extra hour to test your smoke alarms. Smoke alarms should be replaced every 10 years, whether they are in good working order or not. Make sure you have fresh batteries in alarms that are not expired. Also, practice a home fire drill to make sure everyone knows at least two ways out of the house and where to meet following an evacuation.
To round out the weekend, there is also a fun event in Wheaton to close the weekend. Bring the family, along with a cozy blanket or chairs, to Marian Fryer Town Plaza on Sunday, Nov. 1, for an outdoor screening of Disney’s Coco, a movie about family, music, and the memories that connect us. The Día de los Muertos celebration begins at 4 p.m. The plaza is located at 2424 Reedie Drive in Wheaton and parking is free.
As always, my appreciation for all of you,
Marc Elrich
County Executive
Read the original article at mcgov
