A shoe which has taken decades to reach the floor dropped last week. We now know what had been both a jealously guarded secret and generally assumed among many: Where the Ulster County Resource Recovery Agency wants to put a landfill. That place being about as far away from the more-affluent parts of our beautiful county as you can get and still be in Ulster — the Town of Wawarsing.

The UCRRA has in days past been almost-renegade in its defiance of the rest of county government, but things have been different since Marc Rider, a former candidate for county executive and a current Kingston Board of Education trustee, took over as its executive director. While the job may seem to some like a mission impossible, in releasing the long-awaited landfill sites feasibility study last week, Rider, who knows as well as the rest of us the intensity of the poopstorm he’s in for from pissed-off Wawarsing residents, was refreshingly candid in his delivery. While the report identified one site in the Town of Esopus and two in Plattekill as possibilities, Rider took them off the table.

“While the Cornerstone Study identified two sites in the Town of Plattekill as ‘technically feasible,’ my review of the pros and cons of these two sites suggests that they are not likely to be successful in the permitting and entitlement process due to a variety of factors,” Rider said.

So Wawarsing it is, and Ulster County’s solid-waste saga enters a new chapter.

Almost two years ago, your Editorial Team used some pretty strong language in administering a tongue-lashing to those who would, if they could, keep on sending our trash to a landfill hundreds of miles away. “Frankly, we find this [send garbage to Seneca Meadows] attitude from a populace containing many who consider themselves top-shelf environmentalists to be odious hypocrisy,” we wrote. “But the alternative — finding someplace in our own county to put our own trash — is utterly unthinkable to probably at least half of the 182,000 or so who live, and make garbage, in Ulster County.”

Has that figure changed? It might have now in Woodstock, Saugerties, New Paltz and our own City of Kingston; after all, knowing that it’s not going near you makes a landfill a lot more acceptable, does it not?

And our collective hand may at this point be forced. Even if Seneca Meadows gets its permit renewed until 2040, that’s only 15 years away. In terms of public works projects, that isn’t much time at all. This can’s been kicked down the road a long time, and it’s now our responsibility to metaphorically pick it up and put it in a recycle bin.

Which is easy to say if you don’t live in Wawarsing. Rider again: “It’s reasonable to ask why the only two sites in the entire county that I am recommending are both in the Town of Wawarsing. The answer is simple: these are the only two locations with enough land, limited neighbors and environmental conditions conducive to a landfill that are not in either the Catskill Park or the New York City watershed.” There you have it.

But who can blame Wawarsing people for being angry? A town containing the Village of Ellenville, it’s one of the last struggling portions of Ulster County. Downtown Ellenville strongly reminds us of Uptown Kingston 20 years ago, i.e., it’s got nowhere to go but up. But it’s a story as old as time itself, isn’t it? Rich people piling their crap, figuratively and literally in this case, on poor people. See also, “environmental justice.”

As we did two years ago, we think Ulster should take responsibility for its own trash. Since we’re not going back to the days of each community having its own dump, one of our beloved communities has to take the hit, and suffer all the local bad for the collective good.

But if Wawarsing must bear such a burden by itself, it should exact a pretty penny from the rest of us. There are a lot of things an influx of county, state and federal aid could do for that community, and we call upon all of those governments, starting with Ulster’s, to stream a torrent of help to Wawarsing. To do less really calls into question just how progressive and righteous we actually are when it comes to the dirty business of trash.