LEWISTON – Councilors quickly ended a plan to change a Casella Waste System’s operation on Plourde Parkway.

Councilors voted 5-2 to not negotiate with the trash hauler to let it change the way it uses the KTI Biofuels Facility.

The company wanted to make the Plourde Parkway lot, which is leased from the city, Pine Tree Waste’s Central Maine base of operations. The site would be home to 20 trash trucks, which would leave empty each morning to collect trash in around the area and return empty each night. The trucks would not bring any new solid waste to Lewiston.

Casella currently uses the site to sort about 300 tons of wood, concrete, metal and other debris from building and demolition sites. Once sorted, that debris is sent to other facilities. Wood is burned in energy generation plants and mills and the concrete, plaster and metal goes to Casella’s Old Town landfill.

Most of that debris, 75 percent of it, comes from Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

The company would have agreed to bring no debris from outside of Maine once a new sorting facility in Westbrook opens, if the Plourde Parkway deal had gone through.

That was enough to convince City Councilors Denis Theriault and Robert Reed to vote in favor of negotiations.

“If we have a chance to stop out-of-state waste from coming into Lewiston, I think we ought to look into it,” Theriault said. Theriault said the city’s role as landowner would have given the city more control over what Casella did at the site.

But Councilor Larry Poulin the situation with being a landlord considering a lease application from a person with a bad reputation.

“If that tenant decided not to live by the contract and trash the place, we’d have a very difficult time recouping those costs,” Poulin said. “I don’t see anything the city gains from taking that risk.”

Council President Tom Peters moved to call for a vote before opening the topic for public discussion, and both Theriault and Reed objected. They were on the losing side, and councilors voted on it immediately. Theriault and Reed lost a second a time.

But the decision prompted Michael Dumas, chair of the city’s Solid Waste Committee, to resign at the end of the council’s meeting.

“It amazes me that when given the chance to stop out-of-state waste from coming to Lewiston, the majority of this Council voted instead to do nothing,” Dumas said.