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By Frank Lombardi and Lisa L. Colangelo, Daily News

NEW YORK, 25 June 2002 -- With a garbage crisis looming, the trash talk is getting pretty strange at City Hall.

Mayor Bloomberg and his staff have even considered sending some of the city's trash down to the Caribbean on a boat.

"We're looking at many ideas - it's probably something that was floated around," Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty said last night after Bloomberg's town hall meeting in Ozone Park, Queens. "Maybe it's a good idea. I don't know if it's been given a lot of thought."

Bloomberg promised a new trash plan by his 200th day in office, in mid-July. But, yesterday, he conceded that may not be possible.

Since the Fresh Kills, S.I., landfill was closed last year, the city has spent millions to truck 12,000 tons of trash outside the city each day.

New troubles

The problem has become more pressing because the long-term plan of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani's administration - to transport the city's trash by barge and train to a marine transfer station in Linden, N.J. - appears close to collapse.

The owners of the 16-acre site include the son-in-law of Linden Mayor John Gregorio and the wife of a man banned for life from doing business in the New York City's waste industry.

"I don't know that it's off the table, but there have been lots of criminal investigations of the goings-on at that facility," Bloomberg said. "It is becoming more and more problematic."

City Councilman Michael McMahon (D-S.I.), who heads the Council's Sanitation and Solid Waste Committee, said the new trash plan must be realistic.

"I hope they don't come back with some pie-in-the-sky proposal, like a giant ship to take our garbage off into the sunset," McMahon said.

Bloomberg said the city may need two waste transfer stations, and added that finding a place for them won't be easy.

"I think that you cannot site something in a residential community of this magnitude," Bloomberg said. "Having said that, we do have to do something with solid waste, and it's going to bankrupt us if we don't."

McMahon's committee heard testimony yesterday from several companies touting new technologies to deal with garbage.

"The city should look into pilot projects with the different technologies,"McMahon said. "There isn't one magic bullet that's going to solve this."

Copyright 2002 Daily News, L.P. Daily News (New York)