"Eating the elephant:" County Commission tries to digest the high cost of landfilling trash
The Transylvania County Commission, faced with a persistent and growing shortfall in its solid waste budget, consider options including a $200 parcel fee and raising property taxes.
By Dan DeWitt
Brevard NewsBeat
ROSMAN — One of the big, ongoing costs of running the Transylvania County Landfill is processing leachate, aka “dumpster juice,” said Solid Waste Director Kenn Webb.
The county will pay about $180,000 next fiscal year — not including the cost of truck maintenance, fuel, or drivers’ salaries — to dispose of this landfill seepage at the Town of Rosman’s sewage treatment plant.
Then there’s the cost of maintaining and occasionally replacing “yellow iron,” Webb said, referring to the landfill’s fleet of heavy equipment, including a monster cleat-wheeled vehicle called a compactor that packs down the trash and is badly in need of a $365,000 overhaul.
And with the landfill accepting nearly a ton of trash per county resident, per year, it needs to grow.
Next year’s budget includes $663,000 for engineering and permitting of a planned expansion that will cost an estimated $131 million over the next 30 years and that was approved by the County Commission in 2020 because this long-term cost is at least $10 million less than the alternative — trucking the waste outside the county for disposal.
The bottom line, said County Manager Jaime Laughter: Landfilling trash is expensive and becomes more expensive over time because the cost of creating new dump sites is accompanied by that of monitoring and maintaining the ever-growing inventory of old ones.
“It’s kind of like having a child,” she said of opening a landfill. “It’s your child for life.”
Figuring out how to cover these costs has emerged as the stickiest task in deciding on a budget for the 2022 fiscal year, which starts July 1.
“This issue has generated more questions and comments and concerns than probably the rest of the budget combined,” said Commission Chairman Jason Chappell.
He said this at a budget workshop last week, when Laughter laid out the root of the problem. Many residents think the $1.50 charge for dumping each bag of garbage and the $60 per-ton tipping fee covers the cost of disposal, she said. In fact, it doesn’t come close.
The department’s shortfall has run about $700,000 annually for most of the past five years and grew to $1.1 million in fiscal year 2020, said county finance director Jonathan Griffin, with the difference coming out of the county’s fund balance, or savings. With the mounting costs of expansion, the gap is expected to grow to about $1.7 million in FY 2022, Laughter told commissioners, who put off the decision on how to cover these costs until the workshop scheduled for Monday.
One of the options presented, a $200 fee on improved parcels, would not automatically apply to residents of Rosman or city of Brevard and is common across the state. But this and the other possible solutions were so unpalatable that one commissioner asked if the portions could be divided.
“Do we have to eat this elephant all at one time this year?” asked Commissioner Larry Chapman. “Can we attack it, say, instead of doing $200, do $100 and pull the rest out of the fund balance?”
Not without jeopardizing solid waste operations, Laughter responded. “The fee structure has to be fixed,” she said.
Though commissioners asked for additional information, they will still face the same basic choices, all of which would maintain the current tipping fee — and come with considerable downsides.
The $200 parcel fee would put an end to the per-bag assessment and the incentive it created among residents to cut disposal costs by recycling. Applied equally regardless of parcel value, it would also place a higher proportionate burden on financially strapped residents.
“I am concerned about individuals on a fixed income that don’t have transportation and are paying someone to take away that trash,” Chappell said.
One possible adjustment to address that concern has been adopted by at least one other county in the state, Laughter said this week: a break on parcel fees for low-income and elderly residents who qualify for the state homestead tax exemption.
Two proposals to cover expenses with increased property taxes — 2.94 cents per $100 of assessed value if the per-bag fee is eliminated and 2.44 cents if it remains — would prevent the county from issuing bonds for future solid waste improvements and would levy payment on unimproved parcels that do not generate solid waste.
Having agreed to a 2.53-cent increase to cover a similar gap in fire department funding earlier in the same workshop, commissioners Chapman and Teresa McCall rejected that option.
Covering disposal costs with the per-bag fee would require raising it to $12, another possible solution. But Laughter acknowledged that amount is more than most residents would be willing to pay. It might also jeopardize collection-center attendants handling large sums of money and encourage illegal dumping.
Finally, there’s an option that “is not one I have recommended,” Laughter said: Closing the three collection centers where most residents dump their garbage.
This would result in a net savings of about $650,000, she said, and lower the needed supplement from a parcel fees or property tax.
McCall requested more information on this proposal, and Vice Chairman Jake Dalton said afterwards that, as a business owner, it initially seemed to be the most obvious solution. “When I run into an issue where I’m overextended, the first thing I do is cut costs,” he said.
But Commissioner David Guice pointed out that many residents already drive long distances to dump waste.
“What I hear all the time is, we don’t have enough” collection centers, he said. And, sharing a common sentiment, he added, “I don’t like any of the options.”
The Landfill
But one of them is necessary, it was clear, after Webb conducted a tour of the landfill property east of Rosman and explained the high cost of solid waste.
The facility, he said, is like a 40-acre construction site where the work proceeds indefinitely, rain or shine, and on windblown, mountainous terrain that receives some of the heaviest rainfalls in the East.
Partly to limit the amount of trash blown from the landfill, the active dump site must be covered with compacted soil every night and workers or volunteers enlisted to pick up stray garbage.
He pointed out the steep artificial hillside that descends hundreds of feet from the dump site to a settling pond and a leachate tank below.
“You can’t talk landfills without talking slopes,” he said.
Even the most stable, mulch-covered section of this hill must be maintained to control erosion, he said. So must the network of pipes and the earthworks that prevent relatively clean runoff from flowing into the landfill, where it would add to the already heavy load of leachate.
“When it’s raining really hard, it’s not unusual for us to be running two trucks (to the Rosman plant) eight to 10 hours a day,” he said.
Webb, driving to a high point with expansive views of the Blue Ridge Mountains, said he is conscious of the beauty of the property and proud of the department’s efforts to keep it that way.
“I told staff when I arrived (three years ago) that one of my goals is to have people confused about whether this is a solid waste facility or a park,” he said. “They thought I was crazy at first but I think they get it now.”
But he is also aware that even a well-run county landfill will continue to consume more and more of this once-pristine former national forest land and more and more taxpayer money.
Building the next 10-acre phase of the landfill, expected to open in 2026, will require permits from a long list of agencies including the state Department of Environmental Quality and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Other costs include sealing the current 30-year-old landfill site with a plastic sheet about 60 times as thick as a standard garbage bag.
Long-term, Webb wants to do more to reduce the landfilling of recyclable material, including the many plastic bottles that could be seen strewn across the active dump site. He’d like to explore technologies that use waste to generate electricity or that “digest” it into a product that can bolster farmland.
The 750-acre landfill property is big enough to serve the county for another 200 years, he said, but “if we’re still doing things the same way by then, shame on us.”
Thank you for explaining this situation so clearly, Dan.
If you are curious about the landfill you can see it here in my video about dumping trash there. https://youtu.be/tJTXWXX3GfY