ASHTABULA – The City of Ashtabula will carry on in its effort to pursue funding for expanding curbside recycling pickup in the city following the denial of a grant by the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
“We will continue to seek any and all funding opportunities to get this done,” Ashtabula City Manager Jim Timonere said, when asked for comment by the Gazette.
He noted what the city has done in the wake of the EPA denial.
“We have reached out to the County Solid Waste District for assistance and ideas, and we have asked the EPA to review the application submitted with us in order to learn what we can do better,” he said.
Timonere said the city received the following message in the denial notification from the EPA: “The agency received 227 grant applications requesting over $11.4 million, far exceeding the available funding. As in previous years, the competition for grant funding is intense, and funding is awarded only to the highest-scoring projects.”
He was disheartened by the decision.
“The EPA knows how important this funding is for us and the City’s participation in curbside recycling is a must for the County to meet its requirements,” Timonere said. “It is disappointing knowing this they did not fund our project.”
At its May 4th meeting, Ashtabula City Council learned from council member Terence P. Guerriero about the denial during his Public Works Committee meeting report.
He said “one kind of disappointing” piece of news from the committee meeting was that the EPA did not give the city the grant it was seeking to expand curbside recycling pickup to the remainder of the city that doesn’t have the service.
“And for us to do that is going to cost about $300,000, which we have no idea where we would ascertain that at this point,” he said. “That was some bad news. I guess we’ll have to keep trying.”
In response to a request from council member RoLesia Holman, Guerriero provided some background about the issue.
He noted that “half the town” does not have recycling, and the city has been “aggressively” pursuing the EPA for funding for the remainder of the city. Only Wards 1 and 2 have recycling.
“Our city manager has been diligently applying for these grants to fund the rest of the operation, and we were told, as of the last Public Works meeting, that we were denied the grant to continue with the project, which kind of puts us back at Square One as far as how we are going to do it, so it was disappointing on many levels,” he said. “It is what it is.”
Council member Jane DiGiacomo shared what she would like to see done now.
“I would like us to reach out to the county commissioners for help on this situation,” she said. “I hate that the city has been divided in this manner, and I understand why residents in Wards 3, 4, and 5 feel left behind when services are not offered equally across the community. If we cannot provide this program equitably citywide, then I think we need to seriously reconsider how it is being offered.”
Council President John Roskovics said the path forward will be difficult.
“We will try for more grant opportunities, but current sentiment in government doesn’t seem to value recycling or environmental issues,” he said. “We will try to save money in our sanitation fund, but that will be a slow process and is not a guarantee. We are grateful for the original grant and that part of our city is recycling. It’s unfortunate we cannot expand our program at this time, but it remains an important commitment for us to accomplish.”
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