At the Tuesday morning work session, Archuleta County Road and Bridge Manager Kevin Pogue had handed a packet of papers to each of the three County Commissioners — Alvin Schaaf, Ronnie Maez and Warren Brown. The papers detailed the violations of state or federal regulations that Mr. Pogue and SEH consultant Julie Linn then proceeded to discuss in perhaps less detail.
Mr. Pogue and Ms. Linn are fairly new to this project, following the sudden departure of the previous Solid Waste Department manager.
From what I could tell listening from the audience, the problems derive from a combination of employee turnover, poor supervision, lack of proper training, poor local policies, landfill fees set unreasonably low, lack of material for “daily cover”, wind-blown trash, gas build-up, a failed pumping system, and a community that’s filling up its only landfill at a frighteningly fast pace.
Which is to say, pretty much everything that could possibly be wrong with the Trujillo Road landfill operation, is currently wrong.
Or, put into different language, if the Archuleta County Landfill were being operated by a private company, the business owners would probably be bankrupt, or in jail.
Curiously enough — speaking of private companies — one thing that didn’t get discussed during the lengthy conversation on Tuesday is the designation of the Solid Waste operations as an “Enterprise Fund”.
This, from the adopted 2021 Archuleta County Budget:
Enterprise Funds
Enterprise Funds account for operations that are financed and operated in a manner similar to private business, where the intent of the County is that the fund will be self-supporting. This requires that the expense of providing goods and services to the general public on a continuing basis be financed or recovered primarily through user charges. In the event that these user charges are insufficient to cover the operations of the Enterprise fund, transfers can be made from other fund types to provide additional support. The County’s Enterprise Funds consist of the Solid Waste Fund and the Airport Fund.
“Enterprise Funds” are a special category of “self-supporting” government operations that are allowed to function without the revenue and expenditure limits imposed by Colorado’s constitutional Taxpayers Bill of Rights (TABOR). In exchange for this financial flexibility, the supervising government is not allowed to subsidize the operations with local taxes, in excess of 10% of the fund’s budget. The operations must be funded almost entirely by user fees.
It would appear, from the County’s adopted 2022 budget, that the Solid Waste Department will violate the 10% limit this year. But don’t quote me on that.
Mr. Pogue and the commissioners spent some conversational energy discussing the “user fees” part of this tricky issue.
Mr. Pogue:
“The number one thing — and I will really push for this — is to get a scale.” For accurately weighing the amount of trash brought in by each vehicle. “You’ll see, as we go through this…”
Commissioner Maez: “Where did the scale go? That we had down there? That’s what I’d like to know…”
“Yeah, that’s the million-dollar question,” Mr. Pogue responded. “If we had the answer to that, we could go buy another scale.”
He then mentioned dangerous gas build-up in certain areas of the landfill. Next, he pointed at the price sheet for the landfill in Cortez.
“And on the back of this sheet, it’s got all the prices per ton, as stuff comes in.” (We would of course need a scale to accurately charge by the ton.)
“And this sheet shows what we are charging. And you can see the difference in prices, here… His price [in Cortez] is $52.40 per ton. And we’re only charging $17 per ton.” (And guessing at how many tons.)
“So one thing that you’ve advised,” Mr. Pogue continued, “is that we treat this like it’s a business. So if you’ve got $10 worth of costs, operation costs, and you’re only charging $7, you’re losing money.”
I presume the commissioners understand about losing money when running a business, since all three of them are — or have been — business owners.
Commissioner Brown: “That’s probably why we’re getting more traffic into our landfill from outside the area, because people are saving a ton of money, because we haven’t kept our pricing where we need to be, to be operationally sound and competitive.”
Ms. Linn, as a professional geologists and “Senior Scientist II” with the Durango office of Short Elliott Hendrickson (SEH), may have neatly summed up the crux of the problem with these comments:
“These numbers, down here — the last few years, 2020 and 2021 — they do not include what we call ‘C&D’. Construction and demolition debris. So these numbers are actually low.
“Most landfills segregate out construction and demolition. And with you guys now, everything goes into the same pit… so you’re taking the really valuable air-space — that’s what you sell and buy at a landfill, is the air-space — and right now we’re filling it with stuff that really shouldn’t be put in there. Those materials should be diverted…”
“Recycled,” suggested Commissioner Maez.
“Correct. Exactly right,” Ms. Linn continued. “Recycled. Chipped down, reused into something else, composted. There’s a lot of different ways we can use that.
“My personal concern for the landfill is, you guys are really running out of space, extremely fast. The cell that we’re working on right now is running out of space extremely quickly and there’s only a small little area left in the southwest corner there, which we still have to design — which we’ll be working on this year, designing that.
“But, I mean, very realistically, you guys have only a couple years left at that location and then you are out of space and… we’re not really sure where else we’re gonna go…”
She gave an uncomfortable laugh, although the topic didn’t seem funny. Just uncomfortable.
“It takes about 8 to 10 years to permit a new landfill…”
So, our County government may have a couple of years left at the current location… and then they are out of space?
… and it takes 8 to 10 years to permit a new landfill…?
It appears that we have a number of problems with our community trash system. Maybe we can’t solve all the problems. Maybe that’s impossible.
What, really, is the biggest problem?