Yellow-crowned night herons hunt for fish. Couples stroll alongside the gurgling Jones Falls. Cyclists whiz past.

Despite plentiful graffiti and occasional overflows from a city sewer release pipe, lower Falls Road has long inspired grassroots efforts to nurture the corridor into a first-class, park-like urban amenity.

No one, it’s safe to say, ever dreamed of turning it into a trash transfer station.

But that’s the proposal an army of City Hall officials unveiled Monday night at a meeting held at Recreation and Parks headquarters in Druid Hill Park.

The waste transfer and citizen drop-off center, now located at 2840 Sisson Street, would be relocated down the hill to 2801 Falls Road, currently a Potts & Callahan storage facility.

Deputy Mayor Khalil Zaied characterized the relocation as a way to improve working conditions for the city’s sanitation crews, referencing the workplace death of two employees last year.

“They do the hard work that nobody else wants to do,” he told a crowd of about 50 people, nearly half of whom were city staff. He acknowledged that Sisson wasn’t one of the DPW facilities associated with complaints requiring costly upgrades.

“But then,” he continued, “came this opportunity to invest” in the Potts & Callahan site, making the relocation plan an unspecified “economic development opportunity.”

He didn’t have to specify.

In the room was Thibault Manekin, co-founder with his father Donald Manekin, of Seawall, the development company behind projects in the nearby Remington neighborhood, including R House, Remington Row and Miller’s Court.

Seawall has major plans for the land it owns on the east side of Sisson Street between 28th and 29th streets, and has made no secret of its desire to acquire the city’s trash drop-off site across the street.

While Manekin was all smiles at the meeting (“we think we have a good opportunity based on the other stuff we’re doing around there,” he told The Brew), others in the room grew uneasy as they began to grasp what was being proposed.

“This plan is just crazy. We’re talking about destroying a beautiful place that has huge potential,” Sandy Sparks, president of Friends of the Jones Falls, said afterwards, explaining what she saw as the biggest surprise for many in the audience.

“People had no idea that they were going to propose closing part of Falls Road to all traffic all the time.”

Blocking Off Falls Road

Mayor Brandon Scott dispatched an impressive array of top officials to roll out the plan.

Presiding over the meeting was Chief of Staff Calvin Young, who introduced City Council members Jermaine Jones and Odette Ramos, Director of Government Relations Nina Themelis, soon-to-retire Planning Director Chris Ryer, and Zaied.

Transportation Director Veronica McBeth was there, too, but she let her capital planning chief, Sean Burnett, do the talking on the touchy topic of site access.

Burnett explained that the plan requires closing off Falls Road between Mount Vernon Mill No. 1 and the 29th Street Bridge. The closure is needed to keep garbage trucks and citizens making trash drop-offs from plugging up Chestnut Avenue and other residential streets in Hampden.

How then to access the site?

Drivers would have to make their way to Lafayette Avenue in Station North, then come up two-lane Falls Road past the Baltimore Streetcar Museum to the new drop-off site. To exit, they would go back out the way they came in.

“This is going to be a traffic nightmare,” said one audience member.

“We would be redirecting a lot of that truck traffic, as well as just individual traffic from people trying to drop these goods off, away from the residential streets and more towards our designated truck routes along Howard Street, along North Avenue, that short junction on Maryland Avenue and then pushing them down Lafayette,” Burnett explained.

He was surrounded by people who peppered him with critical comments and questions.

“People that in Hampden or Hoes Heights will have to circle all the way through Station North, then come down that little bit of Lafayette and make that hard turn,” a man complained. “All the convenience of the Sisson Street center is lost.”

• UPDATE: Councilwoman Odette Ramos reaches out to The Brew to say, “I am working on keeping Falls Road open.”

Burnett told him the point closure was necessary to prevent congestion on Hampden streets and that people who live there “can all utilize 83 – they can come down, get off on North and come in that way.”

“This is going to be a traffic nightmare,” the man declared.

Another person asked, “Is this going to be paired with [illegal dumping] enforcement?”

“When people get turned away from Sisson,” he observed, “they just find the closest alley and dump there.”

Strolling next to a Trash Center

What about bike riders, walkers, birdwatchers, runners and other pedestrians? Would they still be able to use that stretch of Falls Road, part of the popular Jones Falls Trail and the city’s bicycle network?

Yes, Burnett told them, they would be able to pass through the new “point of closure,” as he called the planned barrier to vehicular traffic.

The prospect of trying to enjoy a natural space amid the sights and smells of a garbage facility – and of sharing space with trucks and cars backed up and waiting to dump garbage – angered many audience members who spoke to The Brew after the meeting.

“Why are you acting like a developer,” asked the vice president of Friends of the Jones Falls.

“I’ve been involved with different agencies in planning for this corridor, and it has been all about ambience and recreation adjacent to the stream and the trail,” said Dick Williams. “Then to find out that this is just going to wind up being where a whole bunch of refuse is coming . . .”

Williams, the vice president of Friends of the Jones Falls, appeared so frustrated talking to Burnett that he couldn’t finish his thought. He approached a DPW official to make another point.

“Why are you all acting like a developer?” Williams wanted to know. “Rather than renovate what you have, you go spoil something else?”

A Done Deal?

Jan Danforth said she treasures that particular stretch of Falls Road not only as a place to walk, but as a quiet and scenic north-south alternative to the I-83 Expressway and other busy streets.

“It’s a little two-lane back road instead of red-light, green-light, sirens and all that,” she said. “The more you take the nature out of the city, the more you forget where you come from.”

Danforth, sounding embittered, concluded from the elaborate presentation that the plan was a fait accompli, designed to accommodate the needs of a private developer.

No dollar figures were displayed or discussed at the meeting.

“It’s over. This was just something for us to blow off steam.”

She pointed to how a city official had shown a timeline that mapped out in detail the sale of the Sisson Street property.

(No dollar figures for the sale of the current site – or the purchase price for the new one –  were displayed or discussed at the meeting.)

The timeline showed that an ordinance for the sale of 2840 Sisson Street will be introduced to the City Council at its next (August 18) meeting, with the land disposition agreement to be completed in late 2025 and the physical relocation of the trash transfer station to start next year.

Call for Alternatives

Despite the well-scripted schedule, some in the room held out hope that the city would look harder at an alternate site.

“I would recommend they use an industrial site that’s right off of North Avenue near the MTA yard,” said former city planner Al Barry, a board member of the Friends of the Jones Falls group.

Friends President Sparks concurred.

She acknowledged that the current Sisson Avenue site is not optimal, with vehicles sometimes backed up on Sisson and other streets.

But Sparks urged the city to “find a better solution” and possibly move what is technically known as the Northwest Citizens Convenience Center to the site that Barry described.

“It would have access east, west, north, south. It isn’t in any neighborhood. It’s certainly above a flood plain,” she said, “and it would be truly convenient.”

Adjacent to a Floodplain

The runoff issue that Sparks raised is one of many at play for a facility where waste – including household hazardous waste – is temporarily stored.

Parts of the Potts & Callahan site are adjacent to and alongside the 100-year floodplain, according to information displayed by DPW Deputy Director Alan Robinson.

He noted that the city has arranged for a site visit by the Maryland Department of the Environment, assuring the audience “we want to make sure . . . that this facility is safe for the environment.”

In a 2023 request for proposals (RFP) for an alternate site for the Sisson Street operation, however, the potential for flooding would appear to rule out the Potts & Callahan parcel.

The RFP announcement flatly stated that “no portion of the site can be in a floodplain.”

It further noted that access and close proximity to I-83  are “essential,” and the city would prefer “at least two access points” to the site.

• To reach a reporter: fern.shen@baltimorebrew.com