CRANSTON — The Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation has until Sept. 27 to settle a $2-million debt in back charges or the city will initiate legal action, members of the City Council’s public works committee said Thursday.
Council members say the owner and operator of the state Central Landfill in Johnston snubbed settlement attempts for months.
“They can’t continue to put their heads in the sand and act like we don’t exist,” Council President John E. Lanni Jr. said.
Friday, Michael J. OConnell, the corporation’s executive director, said Resource Recovery was actually waiting for city officials to contact them.
“Our predicament is that we have requested information from them, and we haven’t got anything back from them, which is why we can’t respond,” OConnell said.
On July 20, the city billed Resource Recovery for $2,096,598.31 in back charges, saying the corporation failed to treat its leachate or pay its share of expensive upgrades. The invoice includes $437,254.52 in operating and maintenance costs associated with the excess loading dating to 2005, and $1,659,343.78 for the corporation’s pro-rated share of the city’s costs of upgrading the plant based on a permit change that year. It does not include possible administrative costs.
City officials also say Resource Recovery allowed three businesses in its Johnston industrial park to illegally tie into Cranston’s sewer service. That violation carries penalties of $25,000 per day per business, city officials say.
City Solicitor Evan Kirshenbaum and Councilman Mario Aceto, the committee’s chairman, have said the city tried to negotiate a resolution for the past year, but agency officials stalled in scheduling another meeting. City officials later learned from a newspaper article that Resource Recovery was planning to build a sewer line to connect into a Narragansett Bay Commission sewage intake.
The Providence Journal filed an open records request on July 30 asking for copies of public documents, including the corporation’s annual budget, along with any supporting documentation and description of the corporation’s leachate pretreatment system or payment-in-lieu of pretreatment and any sewer agreement with the city to extend service to the corporation’s industrial park.
The deadline to respond was Sept. 14.
Friday, OConnell said the corporation’s lawyer was reviewing the documents to see which, if any, would be released “because this is a likely lawsuit in the near term.”
Also Thursday night, the council finance committee voted to unseal the minutes of several closed-door discussions on how much Johnson & Wales University is to pay the city in taxes for 12 lots, roughly 20 acres of waterfront land, on its Harborside Campus.
In 2005, the city rezoned the land and amended its Comprehensive Plan to allow the university to build 12 dormitories and a community building and management facility.
The campus, which includes 84 buildings on the Providence side, was built by a nonprofit agency, which leases the buildings to the university. That raised the question of whether the project was tax-exempt.
Rather than seek clarification, the university and the city reached a 20-year agreement that city officials say was never signed, under which the city was to get $95,000 annually for the first 10 years and $104,500 for the next 10 years.
The “memorandum of understanding” called for the city to collect most of that money from the state in the form of a payment in lieu of taxes and Johnson & Wales to cover any difference between the state compensation and the agreed-upon figure. If the property was later deemed to be taxable, the university agreed to pay the appropriate tax.
This year, Finance Director Robert F. Strom said, Cranston received $4.2 million in PILOT money from the state, which includes payment for the 12 university parcels and 20 state lots. Strom estimated the state’s payment for Johnson & Wales was $150,000 to $160,000.
The university land, Strom said, is currently assessed at $4.8 million, and the buildings at $21 million.
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