JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – It appears that plans to build a controversial waste transfer station next to hundreds of homes along Greenland Chase Boulevard in Mandarin will not happen.
On Friday, News4Jax learned Waste Pro has announced it is withdrawing its bid to purchase land next to hundreds of homes to build a waste transfer station.
Since day one, homeowners have voiced their opposition to the idea.
They are still concerned because they have no idea who will purchase the land next to their homes and what the new owners will plan to do with it.
Kuldeep Naik and Norman Brewer can only look across this community pond in their Mandarin neighborhood that came close to having a waste transfer station built right next to their neighbors’ homes.
“This would have not been possible without the neighbors coming together. The whole community coming together and going door-to-door making the awareness of what was going to happen,” Naik said.
The past spring, trash collecting company Waste Pro was poised to purchase land next to hundreds of homes to build a waste transfer station. The idea was to have a location where smaller trash trucks could drop off their load to be picked up by a bigger trash truck that would haul the trash off to a landfill.
This would give the smaller trucks the time to quickly go back to their trash pickup routes to finish the job.
Neighbors who voiced concerns about the waste transfer station say they support what trash collectors were trying to accomplish but they don’t believe the solution to slower trash pickup should be placed so close to homes where people have to walk out of their houses and look at it, smell it and listen to trash trucks coming and going all day.
“This isn’t just about us and our community here. It’s any community within Jacksonville. No community should have something like that thrust right next to them,” Brewer said.
But now that Waste Pro has announced to cancel their plans to not purchase this land, it’s unclear who will buy the property now and what plans that potential owner has in store.
City Councilman Dany Becton represents that area and says he is not aware of any new locations that Waste Pro is considering to build a transfer station.