Kings Park pumpBY STACEY ALTHERR | stacey.altherr@newsday.com
8:43 PM EDT, July 4, 2009
Smithtown and Huntington have entered a new partnership to buy compressed natural gas at a future Kings Park pumping station that, officials said, allows both towns to expand their CNG vehicle fleets and maintain more stable fuel prices over the next few years.

The agreement with Huntington, which contracts out two-thirds of its garbage pickup, will now specify CNG vehicles in its new bids. The town plans to convert some of its own garbage trucks.

Smithtown was the first Long Island municipality to switch over to all CNG garbage trucks, and has been under contract with the company that supplies the gas, Clean Energy from California, with fixed prices at the company's Hauppauge facility for three years.

"Our goal is to get all of our vehicles to be environmentally friendly," Smithtown Supervisor Patrick Vecchio said June 30. The town has four snowplows, seven cars and a street sweeper powered by CNG

Huntington Supervisor Frank Petrone said the switch to CNG trucks will lessen diesel and other particle pollutants by about 260,000 tons in the town over the next seven years. He said the town will now be able to purchase or retrofit other town vehicles to CNG. "And with the agreement," he said. "we'll be at a fixed cost, which is great."

The station will be built at Smithtown's Municipal Sanitation Facility on Old Northport Road in Kings Park, a half-mile from Huntington's Resource Recovery Facility - an incinerator that produces energy. Both towns truck their waste to the facility, so the station location will be convenient.

Clean Energy will build the new Kings Park fueling station, and enter into agreements with Smithtown and Huntington to stabilize prices from $2.18 per gallon for Smithtown and $2.36 a gallon for Huntington, increasing about 14 cents over the next three years. The contract allows for local school districts to also use the fueling station at similar costs.

Brookhaven switched its garbage fleet to CNG vehicles within the last year.

Officials said there are other advantages to CNG vehicles, especially heavy ones. They are much quieter, run on domestic resources and prices tend to be more stable, officials said.


Buck