One month after the Seneca Falls town board passed a resolution calling on the state to investigate high lung cancer rates around the Seneca Meadows Inc. landfill, the resolution still hasn’t been forwarded to any state officials.
Town Supervisor Mike Ferrara had tried to block the resolution in August by claiming that a majority of the five-member board wouldn’t support it. But when the other four board members voted yes Sept. 5, Ferrara fell in line to make it unanimous, drawing cheers from the audience.
At the board’s meeting last night, the resolution’s author, Barbara Reese, sought to confirm that the document had been forwarded to the state Department of Environmental Conservation and other state officials. It hadn’t.
“I apologize,” Ferrara told Reese. “There was a miscommunication … It should be certified and sent by the town clerk. That will happen tomorrow.”
Town Manager Peter Soscia then promised Reese he would personally confirm the transmittal, but it hadn’t happened as of late Wednesday.
The omission effectively squelches widespread community concern about ways the the state’s largest landfill may be harming the community health. And the timing of the delay is highly significant.
The DEC is poised to approve a final scoping document that will limit issues considered in the environmental impact statement SMI must prepare for its planned major expansion. A draft scoping document released by the DEC in December is virtually silent on how SMI’s air emissions and toxic leachate affect the health of residents of Seneca Falls, a state-designated disadvantaged community.
The state Department of Health has reported that SMI is located within a lung cancer cluster, based on data from 2011-2015. Following up, WaterFront reported in June that lung cancer rates were particularly high in census tracts near the landfill for both 2011-2015 and 2013-2017.
When WaterFront asked the DOH to provide more recent cancer data by census tract,…
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