A Fair Way to Handle Trash in the City In his first term, Mayor Michael Bloomberg mapped out an equitable plan to get rid of 11,000 tons of New York City garbage every day. The complex proposal was designed to make each borough take care of its own trash. It was also supposed to help limit noisy garbage trucks going long distances through the city to reach marine barges, railways or out-of-state trash facilities. Nobody wanted these new garbage transfer stations in their neighborhood, even with promises of new high-tech, low-smell facilities. There are already stations in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island, most of them in lower-income communities. Only one area of the city - the Upper East Side of Manhattan - has refused to accept a trash facility. The city should not give in to local resistance. It is time for residents in that neighborhood to accept a share of the city's garbage problem. The city should build a modern, environmentally sound facility at 91st Street to transfer trash from Manhattan to barges on the East River. That trash, estimated at up to 1,800 tons a day, would then go by barge to other states. Deputy Mayor Cas Holloway said last week that the city has had to fight off "lawsuit after lawsuit" with "every frivolous argument under the sun" from those opposing the 91st Street facility. Those delays have helped push the cost for building the station from $125 million in 2006 to about $226 million now. An earlier trash station at that site, which was closed in 1999, was badly designed so that trucks idled along York Avenue. The new facility, Mr. Holloway said, has been designed to reduce the congestion problem with longer ramps leading to the facility, which sits on the eastern side of Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive. The plans also call for higher noise-blocking walls along the ramps. This terminal is an integral part of the city's 20-year waste management plan. John Doherty, the sanitation commissioner, told critics at a hearing last week, "We will not entertain any changes to what is a fair and thoughtful, borough-based approach that was founded on the principles of environmental equity for all New Yorkers." Environmental equity, in this case, means that the Upper East Side of Manhattan has to do its part.