A group of Torrington-area lawmakers seeking to maintain public control over a local transfer station have pitched a new idea to keep the facility out of the hands of a private trash-hauler: giving it away.

The effort, put forward this month as part of a recently filed land-conveyance bill, would force Connecticut’s Department of Administrative Services to hand over ownership of the Torrington transfer station to the Northwest Resource Recovery Authority for no more than the cost of paperwork and other administrative expenses related to the transaction.

If successful, the bill would also require the NRRA — an arm of the Northwest Hills Council of Governments — to operate the transfer station in perpetuity, as a public facility for handling municipal waste. The facility currently only accepts trash from municipalities, not individual residents.

The state has been operating the transfer station through DAS since last year, when lawmakers quietly inserted language into the budget blocking the sale of the facility to a private company, Enfield-based USA Waste and Recycling. Earlier this year, DAS said it would cease operations at the facility as of June 30, at which point funding would no longer be available to subsidize the cost of the station’s tipping fees.

Or — as lawmakers are now proposing — it could hand the facility over to NRRA.

Leigh Appleby, a spokesman for the agency, said in an email last week that the administrative costs of land conveyances “tend to be very low, if anything.”

“We continue to work with local officials and legislators on next steps for the Torrington property, and this proposal is a potential step forward,” Appleby said.

The bill is backed by a bipartisan delegation of lawmakers representing towns in the Litchfield Hills, who described the NRRA as part of a broader effort to regionalize public services that has proven popular and cost-effective for residents. Five members of the delegation jointly submitted testimony in favor of the conveyance on Tuesday.

“The conveyance of this critical regional facility to the NRRA will preserve municipal access to a publicly owned transfer station and help maintain competitive, stable pricing for solid waste disposal,” the testimony read.

The legislation, Senate Bill 521, is schedule for a public hearing Wednesday.

But the existence of a competing offer from USA Waste to pay $3.25 million to purchase the facility has complicated the NRRA’s efforts, as well as the long-term outlook for trash disposal in the region.

Frank Antonacci, the chief executive of USA Waste, has sought to build support for his company’s bid to purchase the property by offering local towns 10-year contracts that he estimates will save them between $8 to $10 for every ton of trash handled at the transfer station.

And without state funds subsidizing the cost of tipping fees, the transfer station’s rates could rise, Antonacci said.

“If they were able to do it cheaper than the market, they would come right out and say that,” Antonacci said. “They don’t say that anywhere… the silence is deafening on what their rates will be.”

Supporters of the so-called public option, however, argue that USA Waste’s offer would effectively consolidate much of the region’s waste-disposal business with a single company. Once the company’s initial contracts expire, they say, USA Waste would be able to dictate much higher prices that would get passed along to residents.

Senate Minority Leader Stephen Harding, R-Brookfield, who is among the members of the delegation supporting the bill, said town officials “don’t want to end up in a situation where you have just one for-profit organization taking care of all the hauling in the area, and not being able to negotiate with anyone else for reduced tipping fees.”

The NRRA, which came into existence last year, does not have the staff nor the budget to compete with USA Waste’s offer, necessitating the bill to give the property away for a nominal fee. The authority received a $350,000 grant from the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection last year to ramp up its operations.

For the time being, the work of the authority is being led by Rista Malanca, the director of economic and community development at the Northwest Hills COG. Malanca could not be reached for comment this week regarding the conveyance bill.

Another potential wrinkle in the fight for control of the facility is the interest of political leaders in Hartford, where the trash collected at the Torrington transfer station was, for many years, shipped to be burned at the Materials Innovation Recycling Authority’s waste-to-energy plant.

When MIRA ceased operations in 2022, that kicked off the process of selling the authority’s other assets, including the Torrington transfer station.

Under the original terms of the proposal to sell the facility to USA Waste, the $3.25 million in proceeds from that sale were supposed to have been directed to help pay for the cleanup of the MIRA property in the city’s South Meadows. Antonacci — the owner of USA Waste — said the money his company is offering should still go to fund that effort, which is projected to cost somewhere between $48 million and $334 million.

But Hartford Mayor Arunan Arulampalam said Tuesday there is no longer a mechanism in place to ensure that any money from the sale of the Torrington property would go toward the eventual cleanup of the South Meadows.

“Essentially, we have no interest in the current sale of that property,” Arulampalam said. “I mean, taxpayers of Connecticut would be taking a haircut on the [NRRA] deal, but it wouldn’t directly impact Hartford.”