There’s Gold In Them Thar Hill

As old logs and leaves sizzled in the 90-degree heat at the peak of Hamden’s transfer station, a fiery red milling machine moved between piles of debris, shooting sharp chips of wood high into the sky while churning the organic waste into something of value — the beginnings of top-quality compost Hamdenites refer to as ​“black gold.” 

It took some legislative churn this week to make sure Hamden can pay the bill to produce that black gold, part of a fiscal-clean-up lawmaking grind aimed at stopping the town from bleeding red.

The machinery making the composting happen is called a tub grinder. It’s one of several investments — including reclining chairs and fire engines — that the town has deemed necessary to put out and prevent fires around town. They’re also a small group of expenditures that earned top priority and first approval this week as the Legislative Council picks up the process of preparing a capital budget for more such investments all over town by approving an annual capital budget — a task no Hamden council has completed since 2017.

The council unanimously voted in favor of paying for those items during a Monday night meeting at Memorial Town Hall — but has yet to determine where the money will come from.

That Monday budgeting session saw a total of $2,150,000 promised to the fire department and public works to keep the town cool and composed in times of crisis. 

The council promised to consider finding the money to pay for two fire trucks, $55,000 worth of active shooter response equipment, and $80,000 of mattresses and recliners for Hamden’s firefighters. Acting Fire Chief Jeffrey Naples noted that the furniture the town employees are currently resting on has ​“bolts and screws sticking out of them.” And the council OK’d the $500,000 to pay a tub grinding operator.

Department heads said each of those investments will improve public safety around town. The start of that capital budgeting process is also indicative of how the council is working in tandem with the mayor’s office to put out a broader, theoretical fire: The town’s flaming financial state. 

Prior to the month of July, more than six months since a new council first took office, talk of capital budgeting had yet to make it to the Town Hall floor or even a Legislative Council Zoom agenda.

A capital budget lays out how Hamden can fund critical maintenance projects that are long-term investments in town assets, rather than standard yearly expenditures.

Since the 2017 – 2018 fiscal year, the town of Hamden has approved capital plans, meaning outlines of department projects the council would like to fund, but not a full capital budget.

In other words, council members have allotted theoretical money towards a general list of projects — and on a case-by-case basis given the go ahead to actually spend or borrow that money. But they have not established a complete payment road map detailing whether the town would pay for each project through bonding or cash reserves or other means.

As Mayoral Chief of Staff Sean Grace put it, ​“Greenwich might increase their mill rate from 11 to 12 and then build a building. We’re not Greenwich.” 

For years, the town instead engaged in capital sweeps, transferring funds from bonds for capital projects to pay off debt, and postponed critical maintenance operations in a desperate effort to keep the town’s finances from falling further into the fire pit. Read in depth about that here.

Such practices were one reason bond rating agencies have consistently bashed Hamden in financial reports — a phenomenon that may begin turn around this year, as the town has since persuaded those same agencies to upgrade its financial outlook from negative to stable.

It did so through actions like creating a capital reserve fund, which will put aside a pot of money so the town doesn’t always have to borrow, and passing an operating budget that appears to be more structurally sound than in years past.

In other words, planning a complete budget counts. 

Acting Fire Chief Naples pointed out that it has cost the town to push off inevitable, crucial investments. 

“Every day as we prolong this, the inflation in the cost of all these vehicles is going up,” he warned council members as they pondered whether to vote in favor of setting aside $750,000 for a new truck. He said that between January and July, the cost of purchasing a replacement vehicle rose 22 percent. 

Though the council agreed to buy a truck somewhere down the line, it is still unclear whether the council will manage to put forward the town’s first capital budget in five years.

However, one of the projects approved Monday does represent what could be interpreted as a fresh adherence to sustainable budgeting.

That’s $500,000 to pay for ​“tub grinding.”

Or really, that’s $500,000 to contract with Running Brook Farms Nursery to operate a tub grinder — and a screener, bulldozer, and excavator — in order to churn local debris into ​“black gold” … and, potentially, needed town revenue.

Joe Colello, who runs the town’s transfer station on Wintergreen Avenue, plans to turn 100,000 cubic yards of local debris into compost, colorful wood chips, and top soil to sell to residents once that money comes through.

Like an unattended stove top, those piles of tree stumps and dead leaves are fire hazards. 

“This is a build-up that has happened over a long period of time and has reached a dangerous level,” Colello told the council Monday. Over the past two years, he said, there have been four to five on-site fires within the debris.

The build-up is due to both the town’s generosity and its financial despair.

After a series of tornadoes and storms through the past few years that left Hamdenites’ homes damaged by downed trees, Mayor Curt Leng lifted debris drop-off fees. 

“People were crying — they had no place to go, they didn’t have the kind of money to clean up” their properties, Colello recalled. ​“It was a good thing they [the town] did.” (Read more about the prices paid by residents to survive a 2018 tornado here.)

With mounds on mounds of wood and brush, Colello came up with the idea of making mulch — or moving that material through a tub grinder and then refining it through a screening process — to give back to residents, also for free.

A visit to the top of the transfer station produces a view of excavators hauling debris dumped off by residents every 20 minutes into heaps of wood and dirt which the tub grinder then mills into finer piles.

Some of that is put through the grinder just once more and then set aside to remain as wood chips. Most gets put through a screener and is left to sit for months, after which point it is put into a screener once again to make Colello’s famous ​“black gold,” the compost that residents ​“keep coming back for.”

Colello is aware he has created something that people want. He also knows the town — and its taxpayers — are hurting. So, to help offset the cost of grinding up the debris, he is proposing a new plan to charge residents a small fee to drop their debris off at the center and purchase cheap gardening and lawn products. 

He doesn’t know how much he’ll sell the sweet peat or chips for. But the idea is to create a self-subsidizing budget with simultaneously environmentally sustainable implications.

For example, by keeping the material on-site before turning it into sweet peat and black gold for residents to take home, Running Brook no longer has to truck the material back to its own farm in Killingworth, cutting down on gas costs.

Colello said he also hopes to start collecting food scraps from Hamden families to add to the compost. 

“We want this to be as cheap and painless as possible,” Colello said. ​“But if you want your property taxes to come down, you have to do something — to stop the bleeding … and to recycle.” 

Nora Grace-Flood’s reporting is supported in part by a grant from Report for America.