New London ― As of Monday, private businesses no longer had access to the city’s transfer station, a prohibition that officials said will help prevent potentially “catastrophic” incidents while also allowing the city to comply with its lease of the state property for the first time in 48 years.

Up until this week, commercial entities were allowed to pull up to the 63 Lewis St. facility, pay a fee and discard the same types of refuse such as brush, appliances, paint, electronics that are regularly brought in by residents.

But a visit earlier this month by officials from the state Department of Transportation, which owns the property the station occupies, as well as contiguous land where most of the city’s public works divisions are headquartered, highlighted safety concerns of the practice and led to a closer look at a soon-to-expire 50-year lease, Public Works Director Brian Sear said.

Mitigating fire danger

“There’s been a heightened scrutiny of facilities like ours across the country after a number of disasters involving state highways and bridges,” Sear said. “There’s been situations when fires have broken out and burned roads running overhead.”

One major issue at the city facility is the sheer amount of brush dropped off by private companies that piles up almost directly underneath the northbound Interstate 95 lanes of the Gold Star Memorial Bridge.

The presence of the piles violate Federal Highway Administration rules, as well as an Air Space Lease the city signed with the DOT in 1976 that prohibits the accumulation and storage of brush and debris under bridges that might pose a hazard.

Sear estimated 90% of the brush pile, which varies in height depending on the time of year, is made up of material dropped off by private companies. He said the brush pile’s height on Monday was only about 10% of its peak elevations. He could not say what the peak elevation can be as the debris spreads and shifts.

DOT spokesman Josh Morgan said his agency is working with the city to remove any prohibited materials still at the site.

Sear said a contract with the Southeastern Connecticut Regional Resources Recovery Authority, or SCRRRA, pays for brush to be hauled away a couple times a year, but city crews frequently load up pick-up trucks and ferry the brush to a Lebanon disposal site just to prevent the pile from getting too large.

He said a recent fuel oil fire on the bridge could have been catastrophic if the spilled liquid had streamed down to the brush pile.

“And, according to our lease, we were never allowed to have commercial drop-offs of any materials,” he said. “The facility is for municipal use only and if we received any income from a second party, like private businesses, we were supposed to pay DOT 20% of any gross income we got from that business.”

‘No Plan B’ if lease not renewed

Ensuring the city sticks to the letter and spirit of the lease, which predates Sear’s tenure by more than four decades, is especially crucial as officials hope to get an extension of the lease when it expires in 2026.

If the lease isn’t renewed, the city, which unlike neighboring Waterford does not have a landfill, has no fallback location for a new transfer station or public works headquarters.

“There is no Plan B,” Sear said. “We have to make this change to what we take in and make sure we’re on good terms with DOT, whose requests are not unreasonable.”

For Wilson Scott, owner of Scott’s Family Landscaping, the newly enforced rules amount to a “huge inconvenience” for his New London-based company.

“Up to now, if we did a job in New London, we’d drop the branches, twigs and leaves in New London, just like we drop material from an East Lyme job in East Lyme,” he said. “Now we have to load up the stuff from New London and find a place in another town to take it.”

Scott said he doesn’t anticipate the cost of disposal, which he pegged at about $25 a load, to change if he finds an alternate municipal drop-off site willing to take his product.

“The problem is, many times that stuff we collect in New London also contains nips (bottles) and (hypodermic) needles,” he said. “And those are the kinds of things no other town landfill wants to take in and we don’t want to have to sort out.”

Stacey Smith, executive director of the H.O.P.E. Inc., a nonprofit that renovates dilapidated houses in New London for low and moderate-income residents, said she reached out to city officials soon after hearing of the intake change on Monday.

“I have just been in contact with them to beg for a review to see if we qualify to continue because we own properties in New London and to see if we can receive residential status or a commercial exemption because of the type of work and service we provide,” she said. “If not, it will severely impact our work in providing affordable housing because our renovation disposal costs will essentially double.”

j.penney@theday.com