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Sanitation and city economic development officials are due in the city council’s chambers today, to continue discussions of Mayor Bloomberg’s 20-year plan for the city’s garbage. Several new hurdles have emerged, and that has some city councilmembers worried that the complicated plan is coming apart. WNYC’s Amy Eddings has more.

REPORTER: Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to manage the city’s garbage has the support of several environmental groups, because it sets out some ambitious environmental goals. He wants to shift the export of trash from trucks, to barges and trains, to cut down on air pollution. He wants to spread the responsibility of managing trash equally, among the five boroughs, so no single community is overburdened.

What this means is shifting the city back to a system of waterfront waste transfer stations and barges – a system that ended when Staten Island’s Fresh Kills landfill was closed. And this sets the mayor’s big-picture environmental goals against the little-picture ones of waterfront neighborhoods in Manhattan, where residents have been fighting for years to get access to the Hudson and East Rivers. The friction between these two different goals for the waterfront are becoming apparent, and elements of the mayor’s plan are starting to fray as a result.

The biggest trouble spot is right here along the Hudson River, at Pier 52, also known as the Gansevoort Peninsula.

It’s right across the West Side Highway from the Meat Market. For decades, the peninsula has been used by the Sanitation Department. There’s a former incinerator here. It’s now being used as a garage. There’s also a road salt storage shed. And, jutting out into the river is a green shed on stilts, an old marine waste transfer station. In Mayor Bloomberg’s vision, this would be a great place to barge recyclables out of Manhattan, and set up a recycling education center for the public.

But in the past few years, a different vision for Gansevoort has emerged, and it runs right in front of the pier. It’s the Hudson River Park.

Runners and cyclists cross back and forth in front of these Sanitation Department buildings, as they follow the Hudson River Park trail. These buildings aren’t supposed to be here anymore. In 1998, the state law that created the Hudson River Park also made the Gansevoort Peninsula a part of it.

AL BUTZEL: There’s gonna be a lawn for people to sit on, there’s gonna be a small beach for people to use, trees and that sort of thing.

Al Butzel is president of Friends of Hudson River Park, an advocacy group. Under the Hudson River Park Act, the Sanitation Department was supposed to leave Gansevoort by the end of 2003.

Butzel saw the mayor’s new idea for Gansevoort as another sign that the Sanitation Department was doing little to get out of the park, and his group sued. Last November, the city agreed to get the Sanitation Department’s stuff off of Gansevoort by 20-12. And the city agreed to pay the group that runs the park, the Hudson River Park Trust, a form of rent in the amount of twenty-two and a half million dollars. Al Butzel believes this settlement seals the fate of the Gansevoort Peninsula.

BUTZEL: I do not think the Gansevoort site will become a site for a transfer station, even for recyclables.

REPORTER: And that’s not the end of the city’s garbage plan problems on the West Side. There’s another marine transfer station that operates inside the park, at West 59th Street, one that was grandfathered in by the Hudson River Park Act.

Currently, it handles recycled paper, but Mayor Bloomberg wants to enlarge it, so it can take some of Manhatta’s commercial garbage, 60 percent of which is now trucked to other boroughs. Butzel’s group is opposed to any expansion, saying it’s against the law. And that has City Councilman and Sanitation Committee chairman Michael McMahon worried that the plan may be falling apart.

McMAHON: When you're putting in place a 500 million dollar capital plan and a 20 year operating plan, you should get it right, and right now, the Manhattan situation is pretty bleak.

REPORTER: McMahon's committee will hold a hearing this afternoon to discuss the "Manhattan situation." For one thing, McMahon says, if recyclables can’t leave the borough by barge from Gansevoort, they will have to leave by truck…something the mayor wanted to avoid.

And if commercial garbage can’t go to a new and improved waterfront facility at West 59th Street, he says Bloomberg may not be able to make good on his promise to cut back the number of private garbage transfer stations in overburdened communities like Greenpoint, Williamsburg, and the South Bronx.

But mayoral spokesman Jordan Barowitz says the city’s moving ahead with the plan, and that it is NOT in jeopardy.

Barowitz: We delivered it to the council coming up on a year ago, and we look forward to working with them and ironing out whatever kinks still exist and answering any questions they have.

REPORTER: Barowitz doesn’t seem to think the city’s legal agreement on Gansevoort complicates matters. That may be because the city has considerable leverage, since it provides half of the park’s financing. The other half is provided by the state. Mark Izeman also thinks the West Side facilities are still in play. Izeman is with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group that supports the mayor’s plan.

IZEMAN: The plan’s not falling apart, but there has been surprising delays in finalizing negotiations between the city council and the administration. And it’s important that those two bodies get together and hammer out their differences and move forward.

REPORTER: That delay Izeman is referring to was over another controversial piece of the Manhattan garbage puzzle: the proposed re-opening of a waste transfer station along the East River, at East 91st Street. That facility was in former Council Speaker Gifford Miller’s district….and negotiations between the council and the administration ground to a halt as Miller fought to keep East 91st Street off the table.

A divided council ultimately approved re-opening it. But local residents have sued, creating another thorny problem that is sure to be discussed at tomorrow’s hearing. Councilman McMahon says that when it comes to moving trash from Manhattan’s waterfront, the city may find itself back at the drawing board, with fewer options.

McMAHON: Manhattanites are going to have to sit down and say, well it’s nice to have parks everywhere, but how are we going to move our trash? And until they’re willing to do that, I don’t think there’s hope to solve the citywide problem.

REPORTER: At the hearing, the Friends of Hudson River Park will offer some alternatives farther inland….perhaps near West 30th Street and Twelfth Avenue, where the group says trash can easily be shipped by train over Amtrak’s rail lines. That area is no longer slated to become a stadium for the Jets. But local residents are unlikely to embrace a garbage transfer station, either….and the debate is likely to keep the Mayor and the Council busy for quite some time.