HERC Contract Extension - Board Vote!
Start: Tuesday, February 06, 2024•01:00 PM
End: Tuesday, February 06, 2024•03:00 PM
This directly conflicts with community demands for closure when the current contract expires in 2025, and also with the County’s own closure plan timeline of 2028-2040. Despite community demands for transparency, genuine engagement, and restitution, the County is making back-room decisions about our lives with no consultation. Decisions and processes that impact our health should require our input and consent!
There is still time to stop this. The commissioners have the power to slow this process down and work with community to make sure this contract is vetted and reviewed in public prior to full Board approval. Millions of dollars and significant health and safety issues are at stake. The county claims early termination will be allowed, but have provided no specific information. There are also provisions in the existing contract that make HERC's operations less efficient and safe, and experts in our coalition had been working to address these, but this rushed contract extension would make that impossible.
**Click here to email and call commissioners** to demand time and opportunity for public scrutiny and transparency, and join us on February 6th at 1pm to show that our community must not be treated like this.
As the People's HERC Transition Plan shows, the burner can be closed by 2025. The county is taking on millions of debt each year to keep HERC running ($37.7 million since 2012) -- money that should be going towards real waste solutions instead of costing us lives and the environment.
HERC is a giant trash burner owned by Hennepin County and located near Target Field between Downtown and North Minneapolis.
It has burned 1,000 tons of trash almost every day since it was built in 1989. It is the single biggest polluter in all of Hennepin County.
It emits numerous health-damaging air pollutants into some of the most overburdened and health-impacted communities in MN-- including lead, particulate matter, toxic PFAS, and carcinogenic dioxins from burning many tons of plastic each day, etc. The population within a 3-mile radius has a higher concentration of low-income households than 89 percent of the state, and a higher percentage of people of color than 90 percent of the state.
More information about HERC's harms and risks can be found here.
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