COLONIE — A hazardous waste disposal company wants to build two buildings on 15.4 acres off Morris Road.
Veolia North America presented its sketch plan to the Planning Board earlier this month and the operations manager, Gary Zeh, said the company has outgrown its location on Northway Lane, and needs more space.
He also said the waste, which includes acids, waste oil and radiation from businesses like Global Foundries, is not stored or treated on site but rather collected there and nearly immediately transported out for proper disposal.
“We don’t store anything at the facility, it is all inbound and outbound as per our permit and regulations,” he said, adding the state Department of Environmental Conservation, the federal Environmental Protection Agency, the state Health Department and other agencies all monitor the company’s activities. “Everything that comes in is packaged in DOT [state Department of Transportation] approved containers for shipment before it comes in to us.”
The company has offices across the U.S. and is headquartered in Boston. Zeh said it has grown between 10 and 13 percent a year over the past decade.
The plan is to build one 15,000-square-foot office and maintenance building and a 25,000-square-foot warehouse for medical waste management. The offices currently on Northway Land and in Schenectady would consolidate at Morris Road.
The plan includes 52 parking sports. The buildings would take up 1.8 percent of the site, pavement and sidewalks 49.8 percent and there would be 42.3 percent greenspace.
The land is zoned industrial but is also in a Conservation Overlay District, which, according to town regulations, requires 40 percent of the land to remain open space. Open space is land that is, essentially, forever wild, while greenspace can include land that has been manipulated by landscaping, for example.
Veolia’s engineer, Nicholas Costa, said the applicant is disputing the open space requirement as it applies to that plot of land based on the belief “it lacks features deemed to be of conservation value.”
Some board members were skeptical and both the board and Veolia agreed the final percentage of open space would have to be worked out for the project to proceed.
The plan calls for a new road built, on town land, with an access onto Morris Road. The warehouse is projected to generate four new trips per afternoon rush hour and five trucks per day for the first year of operation, which will increase to 15 trucks per day during the third year.
