News

Commissioners shoot down waste-control ordinance

Garbage trucks wait to cross scales at the Henderson County landfill.

By Bill Moss, Published: September 21, 2016

The Henderson County Board of Commissioners on Wednesday killed a proposal that would have required that waste collected in the county stay in the county, a measure the county manager and solid waste officials had proposed to shore up the money-losing landfill.
Commissioners Charlie Messer, Grady Hawkins and Bill Lapsley all said that the flow control wasn’t needed or that other solutions were less disruptive to the market. Commissioner Michael Edney said the ordinance would penalize Laurel Park, which contracts with a private hauler to pick up garbage.
“I believe that the cost of operating the recycling center should be borne by all the taxpayers and the tipping fee should be reduced to where our neighbors are at, and I think if we did those two things we wouldn’t have to worry about the tonnage going outside the county,” said Lapsley, who supports instead an annual fee that all taxpayers would pay to balance the solid waste budget.
Hawkins said his check of the county budget so far this fiscal year shows that the net revenue is $800,000 over expenses.
“That in itself I guess based on good work of the solid waste folks in my mind doesn’t necessitate any kind of additional ordinance at this time,” he said. “In addition to that, we have had a huge tax increase in this county. If we need to increase spending because of the federal or state, we certainly have the funds for that.”
The ordinance, which has been in the works for a year and a half, would have required licensed haulers who serve any part of unincorporated Henderson County to dump the waste at the county landfill, which has a higher tipping fee than neighboring counties. The ordinance would not have applied to city of Hendersonville, which has its own sanitation department, but would have increased garbage collection cost in Laurel Park, which contracts with a commercial hauler to pick up waste in the city.

The ordinance was needed, county officials said, to balance the landfill budget, which is set up to run on a pay-as-you-go basis. That cost includes not only the cost of hauling the waste to its ultimate destination — a landfill in South Carolina — but also the free disposal of household recycling and the future liability of landfill even after it’s closed.
“You are dealing with federal and state mandates that say you will monitor the landfill for the rest of time and when they find that, for example, groundwater shows signs of having solid waste deposits, you will have to deal with that,” County Attorney Russ Burrell said. An array of recycling, from appliances to household hazardous waste, are all controlled by government regulations, he added. “There are lots and lots of things that cannot be landfilled,” he said, and must be dealt with in a more expensive way.
County Commissioner Charlie Messer opposed the ordinance, saying he could only support it if the county lowered the tipping fee to match Buncombe County’s, which is $10 less per ton.

Commissioners defeated the so-called flow control ordinance after three speakers expressed strong oppostion.

"The monopolilzation of the transfer station seems a desperate attempt to continue operation of an inefficient facility," said William Vine, a resident. "The transfer station faces about a 10 percent deficit in spit of charging 25 percent more than adjacent counties. The proposal is a classic example of government overreach, making a bad situation worse by failure to understand how enterprise works."

The flow control ordinance gave an opportunity for Vine to further castigate the commissioners for enacting a 5-cent tax increase, for the "sudden appearance of new spending not adequately vetted or prioritized" and for supporting a quarter-cent local option sales tax. "To add insult to injury, the commissioners usurped the power of the School Board to plan and execute the renovation of the high school," instead choosing a plan that is "more expensive than the more popular designs," Vine added.