Mark Maurer

City Council member Ben Kallos plans to introduce a bill today requiring that a city planner attend every meeting held by the city’s 59 community boards.

Kallos said the bill intends to give communities a more active role in the land use review process, the Gotham Gazette reported. The bill would form a planning department in the five borough president offices. There would be at least one professional urban planner on staff for each community board.

The proposed Upper East Side waste-transfer station would cost triple what the city currently pays to transport garbage through the borough, according to a study from the Independent Budget Office.

Moving garbage to New Jersey and Yonkers for incineration would cost $278 per ton through the controversial station, rather than $93 per ton, as it does now. Over the next 20 years, the city would pay $632 million to dispose of Manhattan’s trash with the new station at East 91st Street. The price tag now is $253 million.

“The per-ton export cost is higher under the MTS option due to the more costly multimodal method of transporting the waste from the transfer station to its final destination via barge and rail,” a spokesperson for the Independent Budget Office told the New York Post.

City Council member Ben Kallos of the Upper East Side requested the study in April.