Living Up to Our Environmental Commitments is Worth It

TL;DR: Longmonters care about the environment, and that’s why in 2023, Longmont City Council committed to diverting 75% of waste from landfill by 2030. Dealing with the waste modern society generates is hard, and will require creative solutions that are in our power to enact. Attacking City Staff for pursuing those solutions is wrong.

Longmont Has Made a Commitment to Protecting the Environment

Longmont residents have consistently made clear that protecting the environment and slowing global warming are priorities. It’s why Longmont led the way in pushing the Platte River Power Authority to pursue carbon free electricity. In 2023, Longmont committed to diverting 75% of waste from landfill by 2030.

To achieve Zero Waste and meet our commitments to protect the environment, we need a regional composting facility to take in food and other compostable wastes from cities including Longmont. Compostable wastes in landfills emit methane and other VOCs which are potent greenhouse gasses, many times worse than the carbon dioxide emitted from burning fossil fuels. Diverting these wastes turns them into a natural fertilizer which can be used for agriculture, thereby also reducing the climate impacts of agriculture and supporting local farms.

Living Up to Our Commitments Requires Courage and Creativity

Previously, the County had attempted to place this composting facility at the site of the former Rainbow Tree Nursery. This plan was abandoned due to a lawsuit, which perversely claimed that composting didn’t serve the open space goal of protecting the environment.

To honor this, City of Longmont Staff came up with a new proposal which was consistent with these goals. The Distel Open Space is currently a gravel mine (pictured above), which will continue to operate until 2033.

Next door is the Tull property, which used to be a gravel mine and is now owned by Longmont’s Public Works department and is currently used to store dirt.

The Environmental Benefits of Saying Yes

This clever proposal from City of Longmont Staff has many environmental benefits.

Match Our Actions to Our Values

Committing to waste reduction is the easy part. The hard part is building the infrastructure to actually deal with the waste modern society generates. It’s easy to say No and pretend that there are no negative consequences, but there are.

Get Environmental Benefits Now Instead of Later

Instead of waiting until 2033, the Open Space program gets land which can be protected now. In fact, it sets aside an extra 50 acres over what would otherwise exist. The Tull property is also higher quality open space, as it saw less intensive industrial use.

More Composting Faster

Instead of the current limitations imposed by the city’s current compost provider, a new, modern composting operation like one that county officials recently toured would be able to accept a wider range of compostable wastes. Modern techniques also mitigate some potential nuisances of a compost facility. Using city owned land gives the city more control over the creation of the facility, meaning we can stop warming the planet years faster.

Protect the Natural Ecosystem That Exists Already and Save Taxpayer Money

Because of the importance of composting, City Council has already committed the city to putting a composting facility on city-owned land. If it’s not on the Distel Land, the next logical place is the Tull Land. This will result in greater harm to the environment and a waste of time and effort reclamating the Distel land and also using the Tull land for public works purposes. It just makes sense to keep land already being used for industrial purposes for industrial purposes.

Riparian Ecosystem Protection

As part of the land swap, land directly adjacent to the Boulder Creek would become protected by Open Space rules. Additionally, while the exact location of the eagle confluence is kept secret, City Staff say that this swap would increase between the confluence and the composting facility.

The Environmental Harms of Saying No

Most of the attention in the public debate has been on the legalistic consequences of the land swap and the claim that it creates a slippery slope. I think it’s worth thinking about the other direction — what are the consequences of saying no?

Others Will Bear the Environmental Cost of Our Lifestyles

If we fail to meet our waste reduction commitments, others will bear the cost. It’ll continue to be the people of Erie who receive our trash. It’ll be our children, who will live in a hotter, more inhospitable world for human life. And we’ll have to answer the moral question of whether we did the right thing for them, even if it was hard for us.

We’ll Emit More Potent Greenhouse Gasses for Longer

Boulder County is still doing the study to determine where the right place to put our regional composting facility is, but it seems clear to me that putting it in the City of Longmont is the preferred option. If that option isn’t available, the County will be forced to explore other options which will take longer, and will lack the force of our commitments to minimize our harm to the environment. That’s more compostable wastes going into the trash for many more years than is necessary, and the methane and other VOCs emitted from compostable wastes in trash are more than 80 times worse than carbon dioxide for trapping heat.

We’ll Waste Taxpayer Money

Our financial resources are finite, and the dollar we spend reclamating an industrial site on the Distel land, plus the dollar we spend converting the Tull land to industrial use, is two dollars we could’ve spent investing in other ways to reduce our environmental impact or improving other city services. Longmonters are culturally thrifty, but we are willing to spend the money when we believe the cause is worth it. Spending money twice when we didn’t have to spend it at all isn’t good stewardship of taxpayer funds.

We Can Trust Longmont’s City Staff

An ugly side of this public debate has been the many public allegations of bad faith directed towards Longmont’s city staff. In my work volunteering and advocating for Longmont, I have worked with and become friends with staff across many city departments, and many of the allegations against them are uncalled for.

Declaring that the Open Space Program is “under attack” by the Public Works and Utilities Department is hyperbolic and bears no resemblance to the honorable public servants of that department who I know.

Municipal employees do not have the luxury of picking and choosing which rules to follow. They are required to act in accordance with the directives of City Council. The hard work they do is how the commitments we make become reality — even when those commitments require difficult decision making. Publicly attacking them for doing that work is how we lose the staff who just want to make Longmont the best place it can be, even though many city employees can’t afford to live here.

Though the City of Longmont strives to pay city employees a competitive wage, one of the greatest fringe benefits of working for the City is working for an organization whose mission they believe in. Being attacked for “green washing” or for attempting to “bait and switch” the residents of Longmont makes it harder to attract and retain the good people who make Longmont such a great place to live.