If at First You Don't Succed...

Can you believe it, after only six and a half years on the job, the mayor finally has some good news out of Albany? Here's the NY Post story on the deal for the Gansevoort recycling center: " Mayor Bloomberg broke his Albany losing streak yesterday by winning state approval to build a trash-transfer station on the Hudson River near Gansevoort Street - the last hurdle to his sweeping overhaul of the city's garbage system."

We guess that Bloomgerg finally gets it: you have to really negotiate with Shelly Silver and you can't simply bogart him as you do some others we can think of. But what really has the mayor gained from this deal? According to his court historian, quit a lot it seems: "The victory allows Bloomberg to complete his massive revision of the city's Solid Waste Management Plan.
The plan represented Bloomberg's answer to the looming trash crisis he inherited after then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani closed the massive Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island. "This is a legacy project for the mayor," Deputy Mayor for Operations Edward Skyler told The Post. "We're fundamentally handling the way the city handles its garbage, to deal with it an environmentally friendly way and not pit communities against each other."

A legacy project? We'll let the real historians be the judge of that; but let's just say that as far as garbage removal is concerned-there's not much there there. The mayor still hasn't figured out any significant way to actually reduce the amount of garbage exported, and the administration's cluelessness on organic waste is right up there as one reason why this Gansevoort deal ain't no great shakes.

Some tinkering with how you transport the waste you're exporting is no substitute for a plan that would radically reduce the amounts sent out to area landfills. As we've said in the past, if this is, as the mayor has described it, a "groundbreaking" plan, than the man must be digging with a plastic spoon.