Nothing Is Easy In Hawleyville

On one end of Hawleyville Road, they were celebrating this week. On the other, commiserating.

Late last week, the United States Postal Service reached a milestone in its long tortuous quest to maintain a post office in Hawleyville. It decided to locate a new facility at 23 Barnabas Road to replace the ramshackle, but beloved, post office on Housatonic Railroad property on Hawleyville Road that it unceremoniously abandoned in January.

While local advocates for the beleaguered neighborhood post office are happy with the decision, it is fair to say that few are happy with the way the postal service jitterbugged its way to a resolution of the issue, confusing postal patrons and a few eager developers with a series of stutter-steps, head fakes, and misdirection that first led people to believe that the post office would stay where it was, then would close for good, and then would reappear in one of three places (think three-card monte). Let’s hope that now that the project will be delivered into the hands of a private developer, the worst is over and things will move in a straight line toward renewed neighborhood postal service for Hawleyville residents.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the tracks in Hawleyville, the worst is definitely yet to come. The Housatonic Railroad Company’s plan to quadruple the capacity of its solid waste transfer station promises to provide Hawleyville with a perpetual soundtrack of growling tractor-trailer compression brakes as 2,000 tons of solid waste are trucked in daily from throughout southwestern Connecticut, get loaded onto railroad cars, and are shipped off on the first leg to a journey to Ohio.

Nobody bothered to ask the nearby Hawleyville residents whether they loved the smell of diesel in the morning... or at noon and night. (Proposed hours for truck deliveries are 6 am to 6 pm Monday through Friday… oh yes, and maybe Saturday morning, too. And the trains? They will be moving through 24/7.) The reason nobody asked is because the people of Hawleyville and Newtown don’t have much say in the matter.

Despite the potential for environmental contamination and other public health, safety, and traffic hazards, solid waste sites operated by railroads are accountable only to the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), and even that arm’s-length representation of Hawleyville’s interests only came about last year with the passage of the federal Clean Railroads Act of 2008. Prior to that, federal law barred all state or local regulation of these so-called “transloading” facilities that have flourished in recent years in this government-created laissez-faire loophole.

As we have already seen, however, the people of Hawleyville don’t let other people trade away their interests without a fight. We expect them once again to rise to the challenge, and we urge local, state, and federal elected officials to align themselves with their cause by getting involved in the pending DEP consideration of this onerous proposal. A review of the legislation that has stripped municipalities of their rights to conduct their own land-use and environmental reviews of such projects is also in order.

We might conclude at this point that nothing is ever easy in Hawleyville. Fortunately, Hawleyville has a lot of capable defenders who don’t care much about what’s easy. They do care deeply, however, about what’s right.