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County ready for lawsuit over garbage export ban

It’s a fight that’s less broad-based than school construction or a firing range. Even so, Henderson County leaders expect to hear from Big Garbage when they gavel open a public hearing on a stiff new trash-hauling regulation in two weeks.

In a 3-2 vote, the Board of Commissioners last month tentatively endorsed “flow control” as the best option to close a half-million dollar funding gap in the county’s landfill operations. Flow control means haulers who pick up trash in Henderson County will be required to dump it at the Henderson County transfer station on Stoney Mountain Road.
At $60 a ton, Henderson County’s tipping fee is $17 higher than Buncombe’s. Even so, a round of calls to local haulers by the Hendersonville Lightning turned up no complaints from haulers and no threats of higher residential rates. If anyone pays more, it’s likely to be businesses served by the big haulers who are more likely to dump in Buncombe.
Waste Management sent a letter to customers last fall implying that the county’s action would increase garbage bills by 28 percent.
County Engineer Marcus Jones scoffs at that. Even if the tipping fee is higher, the disposal charge is just one part of the total cost. Jones said he called the Waste Management official who wrote the letter and challenged his “misinformation campaign.”
“That’s crazy,” Jones told the official. “There’s no way your bill is going to go up 28 percent. Your fuel, your labor, none of that other stuff is going to go up. So maybe a fraction of your total bill will go up 28 percent. And he said, ‘Yeah, you’re right.’”
Jones then asked whether he planned to send his customers a correction. “They of course didn’t,” he said.
Three other commercial haulers have said they don’t plan to raise rates, according to Jones.


Enterprise fund

Henderson County operates the landfill as an enterprise fund, a pay as you go proposition. Like a water system, it’s designed to have customer fees cover the cost.
“There is no tax dollars at all in the operation of solid waste in Henderson County,” Jones said. “We found out we are one of the very few self-supporting enterprise funds and we are the only nonregulated county because Buncombe County basically has flow control on their residential waste.”
The need for new revenue can be traced to the recession eight years ago, when tonnage dropped by 25 percent. The county has nearly exhausted a $5 million fund balance. A big chunk of it, $4 million, went to landfill improvements, including the new recycling center. The county pays a contractor to haul the waste from the transfer station to a landfill in South Carolina. Because the contract has a fuel cost variable, higher gas prices also drove expenses.
“The difference between $2 gas and $4 gas is almost half a million dollars,” Jones said. “I put up the signal that, Hey, our fund balance is getting low. It’s not a dire emergency but we need to look at ways to help shore it up.”
Here are the options for balancing the fund and the Jones’s evaluation of each:
• Property tax money. Not favored. As an enterprise fund, the landfill should be self-sustaining.
• Increasing the tipping fee. It’s already among the highest in the region. The county would likely see more trash cross the county line.
• Lowering the tipping fee to attract more business. “We would have to more than double our tonnage to make that work,” Jones said. “There’s not that kind of trash out there that’s not accounted for. Plus, would the citizens be interested in having twice as many garbage trucks come in to our county with other people’s trash.”
• Tacking an annual solid waste fee on every tax bill. That’s also not an enterprise fund solution. It’s a general fund subsidy. It charges people who don’t use it.
• Charging for use of the recycling facility. “There’s no way to generate enough revenue at the convenience center to cover that gap,” Jones said. Anyone who remembers the uproar years ago when commissioners suggested doing away with the free “bag for bag” approach would not want to revisit that. “Worse public outcry than raising taxes,” Jones says.
• Franchising haulers. “That’s the F-word we don’t talk about,” he says.


Local haulers go with the flow

Of all the options, flow control seems to be the easiest on residential users. And local haulers say they’re OK with it.
“I think we need to keep our resources here,” said Karla Whitmire of Hendersonville Waste Removal. “I have never once crossed the line to dump my trash over there (in Buncombe). It’s your bigger companies that are located out of the county (that export trash), because they own the landfills in Buncombe County.”
A Buncombe-based hauler who has customers in Henderson County foresees no residential fee increase either.
“I can tell you in Henderson County it’s going to have very little effect on us,” said Mike Griffin, owner of Griffin Waste Services. “The only thing I bring out of Henderson County by and large is shingles for recycling. I don’t have as big dog in the fight.”
Because regional landfills must by law account for where garbage originates, Jones said it’s known that haulers carry some 20,000 tons of garbage a year out of the county. Given the net revenue per ton of $20, capturing that volume should be enough to balance the landfill books.
“There’s also the enforcement,” he acknowledged. “Will we be able to capture all those tons? It’s not that hard. You sit there at the county line and watch the trucks that are leaving the county into Buncombe County and hit ‘em with a fee. I envision a retired deputy helping us part-time.”

When county commissioners looked at the ordinance last month, county attorney Russ Burrell explained that a lawsuit was possible but would likely be unsuccessful. Jones said the county is prepared for battle.
“We could get sued by Waste Management. We probably are,” Jones said. “However, this regulation has gone all the way up to the Supreme Court and has been upheld.” The county plans to hire the lawyer who won the Supreme Court case. “So I think we’ll get sued but we have a good case,” he said.
Jones hopes the commissioners adopt the ordinance.
“You look at the negative feedback we’re going to get from flow control versus a tax increase or availability fee,” he said. “It’s just significantly less impactful for our community for flow control than the other options.”


The Henderson County Board of Commissioners will hold a public hearing on the proposed ordinance at 9 a.m. Wednesday, Aug. 17, at the Historic Courthouse.