West Seventh garbage truck depot wins City Council's OK

Yahoo

23-05-2025

Despite months of neighborhood opposition, a trash truck depot will indeed move forward on Randolph Avenue.
West Seventh Street residents opposed to a planned compressed natural gas refueling station and trash truck maintenance facility at 560 Randolph Ave. were dealt a decisive setback on Wednesday when the St. Paul City Council voted 6-0 to deny their appeal of FCC Environmental's site plan following its approval by the Planning Commission.
Members of the West Seventh/Fort Road Federation had hoped to add a series of conditions to the site plan, beyond two technical items tacked on by the Planning Commission on May 2, which included further review of the location's stormwater management system. They were unsuccessful Wednesday. Council President Rebecca Noecker recused herself from the vote on the advice of the city attorney's office, after asking the trash hauler to consider more community benefits.
'If FCC wishes to claim Public Works status, they should abide by that standard,' said Julia McColley, executive director of the West Seventh/Fort Road Federation, addressing the city council. 'If West Seventh is to bear the burden for the entirety of St. Paul, all of your wards, the negative impacts on our neighborhood must be mitigated.'
Days after presenting the Texas-based trash hauler with a sweeping list of demands, members of the Fort Road Federation limited their asks on Wednesday to four key areas. 'We ask that FCC stop inappropriate traffic patterns to and from the site, particularly cutting through the Schmidt (Brewery) site,' McColley said.
She also asked that the hauler limit the total number of trash trucks to 36, and not expand to as many as 80 trucks to serve nearby cities, a goal that company officials have called entirely possible. She asked the city to prohibit other businesses from refueling at the compressed natural gas station, and to block FCC Environmental employees from parking along Randolph Avenue.
The trash hauler has not publicly agreed to any of those items, and neither the Planning Commission nor the city council expressed interest in formally requiring them.
'I do really encourage more communication between FCC Environmental and the West Seventh/Fort Road Federation,' said Council Member Nelsie Yang, urging the two sides to negotiate face-to-face.
Deputy Mayor Jaime Tincher told the council that FCC Environmental has expressed willingness to meet with the federation and consider 'solutions that work for everyone,' but caselaw made it inappropriate to saddle the site plan with conditions removed from the zoning code.
As for future meetings with FCC, 'we intend to help facilitate that,' Tincher said. 'We absolutely believe they can be addressed in a meeting following the site plan process. … The residents' concerns, from what I've heard, they're valid. We want this to be good for everybody.'
A former tow lot, the four-acre site at 560 Randolph Ave. has been the subject of tough scrutiny and heated debate between neighborhood residents, the international trash hauler, the city council and mayor's office. On April 14, Mayor Melvin Carter vetoed the city council's decision to support a zoning appeal filed by the federation, which had questioned whether the privately-owned site met the zoning definition of a public works yard.
FCC Environmental began citywide residential trash collection on April 1, but only after the mayor declared a state of local emergency to effectively bypass the zoning dispute.
On May 19, Noecker's legislative aide shared a laundry list of asks with FCC Environmental, on behalf of the neighborhood organization, including an air quality monitor, local organics drop-off and for the city to establish a nearby park.
'We were supposed to meet on Tuesday of last week, and FCC pulled out of the meeting and said they wanted to wait until the site plan process was done,' Noecker said Thursday. 'Clearly, there's a lot of anger and frustration on the part of the community. I texted the mayor this morning, I spoke with the director of the Fort Road Federation this morning. They're ready and eager to meet.'
The future trash depot, which currently consists of two administrative buildings and a gravel lot, relies on a septic system and will need to be connected to the city's sanitary sewer system, said Tia Anderson, a city planner and project manager. Randolph Avenue, which is a county road, will gain some landscape buffering, a six-foot-tall decorative screening fence, infill sidewalks and boulevard trees along the site's property lines, and as a condition of the site plan, the Capitol Region Watershed District will conduct further review of any stormwater and watershed issues.
Otherwise, 'FCC's site plan meets all the standards required through the law and the St. Paul legislative code,' said Greg Revering, a general manager for the trash hauler, noting the Planning Commission gave the site plan its unanimous approval May 2.
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