– The St. Martin Parish Council’s combined Public Works and Administrative/Finance Committees considered the adoption of an ordinance amending its zoning ordinances to allow Acadiana Waste Services to build a recycling center at 1471 Old Spanish Trail Highway.
The zoning ordinance would be changed from I-1 (light industrial) to I-3 (heavy industrial restricted). The planning commission recommended approving the change, with conditions, at its Jan. 26 meeting.
Jennifer Stelly, executive director of the St. Martin Economic Development Authority, said SMEDA did an economic impact study on the proposed facility.
AWS committed to creating 25 new direct jobs, she said, in an area where a lot of jobs in the area were lost with the shutdown of Safe Source Direct. The new facility would absorb some of those job losses, with the new jobs averaging about $40,000 annual salaries.
“They estimate $1 million in new direct jobs annual payroll,” Stelly said. “It’s estimated to create at least 11 new indirect jobs. They’re going to spend around $3 million in capital expenditures between equipment and the real estate. So overall, total tax revenue over a threeyear period is a little over $218,000. So it’s not a huge project but it’s an impactful project.
“I’ve said before, SMEDA would never endorse a project that we thought would be bad for the parish. We think this is a good fit for this area."
SMEDA toured a facility similar to the one being planned, she said, and it was very clean and quiet and was unintrusive.
“It’s also adjacent to the landfill (controversial Greenpoint Landfill), which I know is an issue,” Stelly said. “But this facility is actually preventing extra materials from entering this landfill."
Chris Schouest of AWS also addressed the committees.
“It’s a sorting and baling operation where we’re going to be processing recyclables — aluminum, plastics, paper, cardboard,” he said. “The main thing is all of these operations will be conducted inside the facility.”
Processing would be in the back building and storage of bailed materials would be in one of the front buildings, he said.
The zoning commission had some restritions it wanted placed on the facility in order to approve the zoning change, and AWS was mostly okay with those, Schouest said.
The first was that the business operate under Acadiana Waste Services. AWS asked that to be under Acadiana Waste Services or an affiliate. Schouest said that for accounting and legal reasons, AWS would likely use a subsidiary to do the actual operations, controlled by AWS but not under that company name directly.
If the facility is sold by AWS, the zoning would revert back to I-1.
He also asked that operating hours, scheduled for 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., be changed to “normal operating hours” being from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., because that gives the facility some flexibility if it needs to make up a day because of holidays, or run a little past 5 p.m.
Recycling
Councilwoman Tangie Narcisse asked if the company decided to start processing outside the building if it needed to come back to the council for permission to do so.
Council Chairman Chris Tauzin said that once the zoning change was made, the company would not have to seek permission for that.
Schouest said the company was willing to agree to a stipulation that all work done there be done indoors, and parish legal counsel Lee Durio said that the parish council could add that stipulation to the zoning change at its Feb. 3 meeting.
Parish President Pete Delcambre said he toured the facility in St. Landry Parish that is similar to what AWS is proposing, and that all work there was done indoors, from unloading materials from the truck to the sorting, baling and storage of bailed materials.
Tauzin said he toured a recycling facility in Baton Rouge that is not as quiet and tidy as the one in St. Landry. But that facility does more than what the one in Cade is proposing to do, he said.
The biggest difference is that the Baton Rouge facility services 250,000 homes while the one here would service 25,000 homes in the parish and perhaps another 20,000 from Breaux Bridge, Carencro and Youngsville, if the company negotiates deals with those communities.
“That’s the limit of what we’re looking for from this facility,” he said. “We’re not looking to be what Baton Rouge does.”
“So we should never outgrow expanding beyond the building we have now,” Tauzin said.
“No, sir,” Schouest said. Cade resident David Pugh, however, raised concerns from residents in the area, noting the Greenpoint facility that has expanded more than once beyond what was originally planned and approved by the parish council, by getting permits from the state to do so.
“Why District 2 all the time?” Pugh said. “We’ve already got this Industrial 3 over there. It started off small. This dump site was just supposed to fill a hole. Then it got bigger. Then people on the wall (previous council members) decided it should be bigger than that. Then DEQ decided, well, let’s change their dimensions so they can get even bigger than what they have It keeps coming to us.
“This little neighborhood, I don’t think I-3 should be anywhere near these neighborhoods. Burke Road is residential, all the way around it. So many bad things can happen in I-3. We’ve all seen it.”
I-3 zoning allows for slaughterhouses, junkyards, salvage transfer stations for waste pickup (garbage), solid industrial waste incineration sites, infectious waste sites, and treatment of non-hazardous waste. About the only thing not allowed would be nuclear waste.
“If you open the door to I-3, someone else will be coming,” Pugh said. “There’s a huge piece of property right behind that.”
Families that have lived in the area for generations now will have to deal with another large industrial enterprise, he said.
And with I-3 zoning approved for a 14-acre facility, there are a lot of other things that could be done on the property.
“What’s to keep these guys from saying, a year from now, ‘Well, we’ve got an extra building, now let’s do tires,’” Pugh said. “Everybody needs mulch, let’s take these tires and make something useful out of it. How about wood waste? There’s some extra acreage in the back. Let’s fill it up with wood, chop it up and make mulch. That might be noisy. It might be a problem.”
Even if AWS doesn’t plan any of those things, someone else could purchase the property behind AWS with the idea of turning it into an I-3 zoned tire recycling facility, or a wood waste recycling facility.
“If you give these guys I-3, (other people) can come back and sue you and say, I want more I-3,” he said. “Is it guaranteed that these guys will only use or two buildings, or can they do whatever they want with it?”
Durio said that if rezoning to I-3 is allowed, it could be tailored and restricted to a particular type of business or practice, and if the company wants to go outside those restrictions, they’d have to get approval from the parish council. Breaking those stipulations would be a zoning violation and enforceable by the parish.
Pugh asked if other people could threaten to sue the parish to force the council to approve further I-3 zoning changes to allow incinerating trash or other heavy industrial uses.
Tauzin said that the zoning changes would be done on a case-by-case basis and couldn’t be forced wholesale for whatever use a landowner wants.
“If we were to rezone this thing with stipulations that this could only be a transfer station, which is what they’re asking for, for plastics, cardboard, and those items, to where it’s not for wood or tires, we could stipulate that and put it in the ordinance,” Tauzin said. “And if they wanted to do something, they’d have to come back to us.”
And since a sale of the facility would mean it reverts back to I-1 zoning, any new owner would have to come to the council to rezone it again, he said.
Pugh also raised the idea of having the facility elsewhere, saying there are at least three places already available that are better suited for it.
“There’s two beautiful industrial parks,” Pugh said. “It was stated at the zoning meeting that SMEDA park is full. Well, there’s three empty buildings there. There’s four lots for sale. There’s two buildings under construction right now. They have room for what they want to do in an industrial park. Plus they have access to Highway 90.
“Then we’ve got the $2 million driveway into the Spanish Trail place. They’ve got hundreds of acres to play with. They’ve got some places to rent. Safe Source has left town. They’ve got to have some warehouses that they could use. And then there’s Martin Mills. What’s wrong with that. There’s a huge parking lot, big empty spaces in there. They could do all that stuff in there. It doesn’t have to be next to people’s houses.
“There’s three different places that are better than this. I don’t know why it has to be in our neighborhood.”
Pugh asked Durio about the safeguards for the community.
Durio said that people can ask the council for rezoning, and the council doesn’t have to grant a rezoning if it feels the property is unsuitable for the proposed use. And the council can add stipulations to the rezoning that limit what can be done. The council can’t stop people from asking to rezone property for whatever use they want it for, such as burning waste, but it doesn’t have to grant those zoning changes. The person asking for the rezoning could appeal to a court if not satisfied by the council’s decision, he said.
“I just think it’s a Trojan horse,” Pugh said. “There’s more coming. I’m really scared of it. I don’t think it’s a good thing. I don’t believe it. Industrial things don’t belong in neighborhoods like this.”
He added that the parish continues to take on Lafayette Parish’s problems.
“It seems like we can’t stop doing favors for Lafayette Parish,” he said. “We keep getting all their cutoffs from all their growth. Now we’re getting Lafayette, Carencro, Youngsville, Broussard, we get all their recyclable stuff and we take care of it for them. I don’t think we should be doing it. Especially not since we’ve got three homes right there.”
