Montgomery County approves $356M plan to keep Dickerson incinerator open

A controversial vote in Montgomery County's council today. Lawmakers narrowly voting to keep its aging incinerator in Dickerson open and move forward with the $356 million modernization plan. Fox 5's Tom Fitzgerald is live in Rockville. Fitz, it's a move that's grown personal between the county executive and the council president, right? Yeah, Shamari, it really has. And this spilled out into the open today between these two leaders. They're on different sides of this question, but this vote. It wasn't a slam dunk. This only passed six to five, and one of the council members voting against this incinerator plan today was none other than Will Jawando, the incoming county executive for Montgomery County. Now, the Dickerson trash incinerator handles about 600,000 tons of waste every year, turning much of that into electricity and ash. Now, the council president, Natalie Fenton-Gonzalez, She has led an effort to keep that facility open, arguing that it gives Montgomery County more control over its own waste. But the county executive has vehemently disagreed with her. He says the environmental health risk and costs are much too high. We need to modernize the ways we do things, composting and doing it in a way that we use and embrace technology and public engagement and transparency. In the long term, the incinerator needs to be more substantially refurbished. And if you look at places where they wind up refurbishing their incinerator, like in Florida, where a major project had done, it was north of a billion dollars. Now, Fitz, this appears to be a hot-button issue. There's been a lot of back and forth, as you can see on this. And is this the final word on it? No, it's not the final word on this and this trash talk that has gone on between the two today. He wants to close it. She and her allies want to keep it going. That's not going to end and here's why. Will Jawando is going to be sworn into office in just a couple of weeks on December 7th. Then there is going to be half of a new council. sworn into office. They're going to take their seats. One of them is going to be Mark Elrich. He won election last week to one of those county council seats. So while this resolution was successful today, this is by no means the end of this debate.