On Feb. 15, the Town Council voted to appropriate $3,600 for additional work the town hopes will speed up the process of capping the old landfill.

The former town landfill on Old Nod Road has sat vacant for decades, and according to Town Manager Karl Kilduff, the 9.2 acres of land was actively used between 1960 and 1979. Last year, the town issued a request for proposal seeking a firm to close the landfill. In May, the Town Council unanimously voted to move forward with an appropriation of $45,000 to help with capping the landfill.

While the capping will help solve a long-term problem for Clinton, a bit of work still needs to be done. In early 2023, Kilduff explained that other towns in the state, such as Plainville and West Hartford, were in front of Clinton in the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection permit reviews. Kilduff said that Plainville waited a year to get out of the review process.

Kilduff said Clinton could shorten that review process by doing additional permitting work. The money propitiated by the council will pay for the engineering fee.

The Plan

Under the proposal from Loureiro Engineering Associates, the town paid $45,000 for soil boring tests. The money was appropriated from an existing landfill capping account owned by the town. Because contractors generally have to pay to dispose of the type of fill used to cap the landfill, Loureiro Engineering Associates will absorb all other costs.

As the first step in that process, an investigation had to be done into the property's soil to ensure the location was a good candidate for capping. In September, Kilduff said that the results were good, and the town was now aiming to get the required permits from DEEP.

Part of what made the proposal from Loureiro attractive in the first place was the ability to potentially redevelop the site.

"The proposal was creative and showed innovative thinking that allows the town to find some value in the site, which has sat idle for a number of years. The approach has been used by other communities in the state to cap their landfills as permitted by DEEP. The approach is a significant change in the cost assumptions the town was tracking against since 2014," said Kilduff last year.

Kilduff said there had been previous interest in leasing the property for use as a solar farm. The capping of the landfill would make the possibility easier to pull off. In 2022, Kilduff said more thought was needed for potential reuse since that would impact the cap's final grading and soil level.

Since the landfill fell out of use, the property has been the subject of occasional proposals and inquiries. The site was studied in hopes of finding a solution for the property, most recently in 2014. The site has also been the proposed location of a failed bid to build an ice rink.