Rockville Asked the County to Prove Its Trash Plan Works. The County’s Traffic Study Checked Two Intersections.

All seven members of the Rockville Mayor and Council signed a letter to the Montgomery County Council on October 12 asking it to slow down on the county’s trash decision, and to prove that whatever replaces the Dickerson incinerator will actually work before the choice becomes permanent.

It is the city’s second letter on the subject. The first went out on May 5, and this one opens by saying Rockville “appreciates the opportunity to supplement” it. In between, by the letter’s own account, the Mayor and Council “received the first briefing from the Montgomery County Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) on October 5, 2026.” Rockville wrote to the county in the spring and was briefed in the fall, about five weeks before the Council expects to decide.

The letter is careful about what it is not saying. “The City is not asking the County to preserve or close the Resource Recovery Facility (RRF) at this time,” it reads. “Rather, the City is asking the County to demonstrate that any system that replaces or supplements the RRF is fully planned, cost-effective, reliable, resilient, and protective of affected communities before an irreversible transition is made.”

What Rockville is objecting to is narrower and more specific: the plan to stop moving the county’s trash by rail and start moving it by truck. Under three of the four options the county is weighing, waste that now leaves the Shady Grove Transfer Station in covered rail cars would leave in tractor-trailers instead, bound for an out-of-state landfill.

Three changes, no plan showing how they work together

The spine of Rockville’s argument is that the county is making several large changes at one site at once, and has not shown anyone how they add up.

“The County has indicated that the future system could include a transition from rail to long-haul trucking, the construction of an advanced waste processing facility (AWP), and modifications to existing composting operations,” the letter says, “but has not yet provided a comprehensive plan showing how these changes would work together or affect surrounding communities.”

That is a process complaint, but it has a concrete version. Each piece has been discussed on its own. The trucking change has a traffic study. The processing facility does not yet have a confirmed location or timeline. The composting change is separate again. Nobody has published the combined picture of what the site looks like with all three in place, which is the thing the people who live near it would actually experience.

The sentence the letter repeats, in two variations, is the argument underneath everything it asks for: “A transition in the County’s solid waste system should not simply shift environmental, transportation, or quality-of-life impacts from one community to another.”

The city is not claiming to have discovered this. The letter says it has heard from Rockville residents who “reinforce the concerns raised at the September 2nd community meeting hosted by Councilmembers Katz and Luedtke,” and that neighbours of the station “have already expressed concern with odors, noise, truck traffic, and roadway impacts under current operations.” The argument is that those complaints exist before anything changes.

What Rockville is asking for

The letter makes six requests, which it numbers one through five. An item titled “Comprehensive contingency plan” sits between the second and third without a number of its own. All six are framed as things the county should complete “before selecting a preferred alternative or taking actions that would foreclose continued use of the existing rail infrastructure.” There is no deadline in the letter and no date by which Rockville asks for an answer.

• A comprehensive operations and transportation analysis at Shady Grove covering all planned changes together, including hourly inbound and outbound truck movements by vehicle type, queuing, noise, odor and staging, and impacts on “Shady Grove Road, Route 355, I-370, I-270, and other affected roadways and intersections.”
• A defined location and timeline for advanced waste processing and truck loading: what kind of treatment, where, and when.
• A contingency plan for keeping the system running when something goes wrong.
• A transparent lifecycle cost, equity and environmental comparison of the options over comparable time periods, including what each would do to the bills residents pay.
• Engagement and enforceable protections for the neighborhoods named in the letter (King Farm, the Farmstead and The Reed), covering hours of operation, truck routing, noise, odor, lighting, litter, air quality, roadway maintenance, pedestrian and bicycle safety, emergency access, enforcement and monitoring, plus a process for reviewing actual impacts after the fact.
• Formal consultation with Rockville, including a seat on the county’s Solid Waste Advisory Committee. The letter notes “at least one Rockville resident has applied.” It also backs upgrades to the county’s recycling facility so it could accept single-stream recycling and food scraps from municipal programs.

Right now the trucks are the backup. The plan makes them the system.

The unnumbered request is the one with the least obvious answer, and it gets a single sentence in the letter that is worth sitting with.

“Under the current rail system, trucks provide a backup when rail is disrupted,” the letter says.

That is how the system absorbs a bad day now. If the rail haul stops, the county puts the waste on trucks until it starts again. Under the long-haul proposal, trucks stop being the fallback and become the whole operation, and the letter asks what the new fallback is. It wants the county to “demonstrate a contingency plan to maintain uninterrupted service during disruptions caused by snow and ice on local and regional roads, regional transportation disruptions, equipment failures or other unforeseen events.”

Trash collection is the kind of service that is invisible until it stops. A snow event that closes I-270 is a different problem when 80 tractor-trailers a day have to get down it.

And a question about the bill

Rockville also wants the cost comparison done in a way residents can actually use. Not just the capital cost of each option, but the downstream effect on “County base system benefit charges, tipping and disposal fees, and the costs borne by municipal solid waste programs and their residents.”

That last clause is Rockville asking on its own behalf, and on behalf of anyone else in the county whose town runs its own trucks. The city collects from “more than 14,400 residential homes,” which it describes as the largest such operation in the county staffed with municipal employees rather than contractors. Those trucks take what they collect to the county system and the city pays to drop it off. If the disposal cost moves, Rockville residents are paying for the county’s decision through a city line item.

The county has not published that comparison.

The study that does exist covers two intersections

Rockville’s first request is for a comprehensive transportation analysis. The county has one piece of that already, and it is narrower than the sentence it is used to support.

DEP’s presentation to the Mayor and Council on October 5 told them “A County traffic study found the traffic impact of trucking waste to a landfill to be minimal.” That study is an eleven-page technical memorandum dated March 26, 2026. It states its own scope plainly: the analysis “focuses specifically on the impacts of these changes at two key intersections: Shady Grove Road at MD 355 (Frederick Road) and Shady Grove Road at the Transfer Station access point.” Within those two intersections it models two hours of the day, a morning peak and an afternoon peak, against an operation of 80 truck round trips spread from 3 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Two details follow from that. The traffic counts the analysis rests on were collected “from 6:00 AM to 7:00 PM” on two days in 2025, so the first three hours of a 3 a.m. operation sit outside the window in which anyone counted anything. And the highways do not appear: Interstates 270 and 370 show up in the memorandum exactly once, in the phrase “traveling out of state via Interstates,” with no analysis of either. The same DEP presentation reassures residents on the point it did not study: “Departing trucks would immediately get on I-270 without driving through any residential neighborhoods.” A neighbouring slide notes that “Over 200,000 vehicles per day travel on I-270.”

The study’s conclusion is accurate for what it measured. Rockville is asking for the rest, which is why its letter names all four roads.

Three documents, three descriptions of the same 3 a.m.

The hour the trucks would start is the sharpest disagreement in the file, and the three primary documents describe it three different ways.

Rockville’s letter calls it a plan: “the proposed 3 a.m. start time for hauling operations raises concerns about sound disturbances to adjacent communities, particularly given the absence of plans for a sound wall or other mitigation measures.”

The county’s presentation calls it an assumption: “To be conservative, the traffic study assumed loads would be roughly evenly distributed between 3:00 AM and 3:00 PM.”

The study itself calls it neither. It says the facility “plans to make some changes to the operations as follows,” and the first item on that list is the 80 trucks between 3 a.m. and 3 p.m. An assumption can be revised. A plan has to be changed.

Rockville raises a second point there that has nothing to do with traffic: under the proposal the trash itself would be less contained. “The proposed transition from covered rail cars to trucks using tarp covers raises further concerns about increased odors,” the letter says. Residents near the station, it adds, “have already shared concerns about putrid odors and noise from current transfer operations.”

The decision this is aimed at

The county’s contract for the Dickerson incinerator expires April 1, 2031, and the County Council has set itself a decision target of Thanksgiving this year. The Department of Environmental Protection has put four options in front of it:

• Option 1: keep the incinerator and overhaul it, at “an estimated $356 million in upgrades,” and find an ash landfill that meets the county’s environmental justice criteria.
• Option 2: close it and long-haul the waste to a landfill.
• Option 3: close it, build advanced waste processing, and long-haul what is left. The county’s own slides mark this one “County Executive’s Proposed Option.”
• Option 4: keep the incinerator running while advanced waste processing is developed, then switch.

Rockville’s position does not map onto any one of these, which is the point the letter goes out of its way to make. Three of the four involve long-haul trucking through Shady Grove.

The system Rockville is defending

One geographic note, because the letter is precise about it and the shorthand is not: the Shady Grove Processing Facility and Transfer Station is not in Rockville. It sits on 45 acres at 16101 Frederick Road in Derwood, just outside the city line. Rockville’s standing here is as the adjacent jurisdiction and as a customer. The letter also asks the county to analyze impacts on Gaithersburg and Washington Grove, not only Rockville.

The station handles about 2,100 tons of waste on an average day and takes in roughly 1,200 commercial and 1,000 residential vehicles. Rockville says more than 2,000 people live within half a mile of it. That is the city’s figure, which we have not independently verified.

The rail system Rockville is defending was not an accident, and the letter leans on the county’s own record to say so. The Comprehensive Solid Waste Management Plan 2025-2034 sets out the history on page 2-13: “The County has a policy to minimize solid waste-related traffic on County roads. In the 1980s, the County constructed the Transfer Station to reduce the number of vehicle trips going directly to the Oaks Landfill. In 1995, the County established a rail haul system to transport solid waste from the Transfer Station to the RRF to reduce substantial waste truck traffic through communities.”

Rockville calls that rail infrastructure “a substantial public investment” providing “significant system-level benefits, including the ability to move large volumes of waste cost-effectively while reducing the burden of waste-related traffic on local and regional roadways and helping to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

The letter leans on a second county document as well. It says the Shady Grove Sector Plan “recognizes the continued importance of the processing facility and transfer station at the location, in part because the facility can use the existing rail infrastructure,” that the plan “does not anticipate relocating the facility to another part of the county, but calls for mitigation of environmental impacts,” and that it projects growth in the area. That characterization is Rockville’s; we have not reviewed the sector plan ourselves.

Rockville’s argument is that the county is now considering undoing a thing it did on purpose, for reasons it wrote down.

The letter does not end on the objection. It sets out what Rockville thinks a replacement system should do: “It should reduce the County’s overall waste stream, provide reliable and resilient disposal capacity, protect communities throughout the County, and establish a sustainable solid waste system capable of serving residents for decades.” The city, it says, “stands ready to work collaboratively” on it.

What happens next

Residents get a chance to hear the county out first. Councilmember Laurie-Anne Sayles is hosting a community town hall on the future of waste management on Tuesday, October 20, from 6 to 7:30 p.m. in the third-floor hearing room of the Council Office Building, 100 Maryland Ave., Rockville. Per the county’s announcement, DEP representatives will “explain the waste management options under consideration, review relevant research and analysis, and discuss the anticipated timeline for Council consideration.” The county asks that attendees RSVP by Friday, October 16 at bit.ly/DEPTownHall.

The Council has been working through the options since the summer. It took up the decision process on July 28 and held worksessions on September 15 and September 29. Neither produced a vote; the record for both reads simply “Worksession.”

The County Council’s next work session on long-term disposal is expected October 27, according to a Rockville staff report, though the county has not yet published that agenda. The same staff report had expected a session on October 13; the agenda the Council published for that day contained no solid waste item. Residents who want to weigh in before the Thanksgiving decision should watch the Council’s agenda page rather than rely on a date.

Neither government has said anything publicly about the letter. Rockville has issued no release about its own correspondence, and the county has not responded.

The letter was signed by all seven members of the Rockville Mayor and Council: Mayor Monique Ashton and Councilmembers Kate Fulton, Barry Jackson, David Myles, Izola “Zola” Shaw, Marissa Valeri and Adam Van Grack. The October 5 agenda item at which DEP briefed them anticipated it. The staff report in that packet reads: “Following the presentation, the Mayor and Council may pose questions to MCDEP and provide feedback to staff on whether to submit a letter to the County Council.” Minutes for the October 5 and October 12 meetings have not yet been posted.

The letter does not mention the Gude Landfill, which sits inside Rockville on East Gude Drive and which the county lists as closed. On October 13 the County Council adopted a 30-year solar lease on part of that site, a vote we previewed the day before. The two matters are separate.

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