Live on the Board IX a - More Solid Waste

A few more items regarding solid waste. This topic, or variations on it, will no doubt come up in debates or in conversations as you're campaigning. Most folks are aware of the recyclable cost crisis, and are concerned that it, as opposed to a lot of other 'crucial' issues, will have an observable effect on them.

• Glass: Glass is the heaviest component of our recyclable stream, and re-directing it would make a big difference. Andela, In Richfield Springs, will apparently take all the glass we bring them, and Karen Sullivan has been talking with Ommegang and other big glass recyclers about getting their glass to Andela. This is ongoing; transportation on a regular basis is an issue.
• Cardboard: There will soon be a separate bin at the Transfer Stations for cardboard. A market has been found, at least for the time being.
• Mattresses (and box springs) – For the last few years, we have been charging $25/mattress (or box spring) at the TS s and storing them in a trailer. When the trailer is full, a company called Triad, from the Buffalo area, comes and takes it away, and charges us a fee. They take the matt/bs apart and recycle everything. We generally break even financially. There has been some talk, and a little investigation, about establishing a recycling center here in Oneonta, perhaps run by ARC Otsego.
• Speaking of ARC Otsego, they are running one of the great places in Oneonta – the Reuse Center, on the corner of Duane and West Broadway, just off River St. They have two warehouses, and they take anything that's reasonably usable, price it and sell it. It's like the world's biggest tag sale, and it's keeping tons of stuff out of the landfills. Everything from big jars of small screws to all the student desks from SUCO's recent remodeling.
• Syrofoam – and speaking of the Reuse Center, they also have a styrofoam densifier, which takes clean white styrofoam and compresses it into standard sized blocks that styrofoam manufacturers will buy. Karen Sullivan helped with the grant that enabled ARC Otsego to buy the densifier.
• Electronics – NYS used to provide a grant that paid for half of County expense for processing electronics, which have their own regulated waste stream. That grant has gone away, and prices are going up. We contract with a company that will – for that increasing price – take electronic materials and process them appropriately. Just a month or so ago, SWEC voted to charge $12 for each TV or monitor (we still get a startling high number of CRT monitors).
• Ag plastic – You may have seen those big hay bales out in the fields, wrapped in white plastic, or the very long white plastic cylinders used to store ground silage. It's single use plastic, and in the spring there are tons of it each year. Often it is buried or burned, both illegal. Soil and Water has a machine that compresses this stuff into large blocks, and we have had about a half-dozen one-day events where farmers can bring the plastic in for free. However, the market for these compressed plastic blocks, never robust, has dried up.

So there are – and have been – some significant initiatives focused on keeping materials out of the waste stream and recycling them responsibly. This is important not only because of the suddenly-high recycling costs, but because there is a finite amount of space in existing NYS landfills, and no one is optimistic about the State approving any more in the near future.

Much – perhaps most – of this work has been done by Karen Sullivan and her excellent Planning and Solid Waste Department team. Since the end of MOSA, we have also had Casella as a collaborative partner, as well. I'd be the first to cast suspicions on the motives of a corporation, but Casella's goals are aligned with ours and we've solved a lot of problems together.

Life on the Board IX - Sold Waste

Today's topic: Solid waste. Delightful.

I've been on the Solid Waste and Environmental Concerns Committee (SWEC) for about four years, and before that I attended meetings pretty regularly, mostly because of the second half of the Committee's name. That's where I heard two of the five members (including the Chair) agree that “climate change is not settled science.” We've come a long way since then – but I digress.

In NY, counties have statutory responsibility for recycling. They can outsource it, if they like, but they have to make sure it happens. Counties have no statutory responsibility for solid waste, although many have a hand it it, including Otsego County.

In 1989, Schoharie, Montgomery and Otsego Counties entered into an agreement to create a collaborative waste management authority. This was MOSA,which had a 25 year life span and could be re-upped at that time. 2014 came and MOSA was dissolved. There had been massive difficulties and differences of opinions, and expenses had skyrocketed. The story of MOSA is very, very long and unpleasant, for the most part, and best left for the history books (for more detail, go to otsego11.blogspot.com and search “MOSA”).

So, since 2014, Otsego County has had its own public-private system. The County owns the two transfer stations: Southern TS, on Silas Lane, out by Exit 13 in Oneonta, between the City water treatment plant and OCSD's bus garage, and Northern, off Rt. 28, a little more than a mile north of Cooperstown. Casella Waste Systems operates the transfer stations. The 'tipping fee' – the charge for each ton of trash delivered to either TS – is now $80; Casella charges us $79.75/ton to operate the TS s, so we make a quarter on each ton.

This is pretty straightforward, although there are separate systems and contracts for such things as mattresses, electronics, agricultural plastic, metal, brush, etc. But the big issue recently has been recyclables.

Up until last year, recyclables were taken at the TS s for free, since we (Casella) could find a MRF (materials recovery facility, pronounced “murph”) that would take it for free, or, from time to time (especially in the more distant past) pay us for the load.

However, you have probably heard of the massive worldwide disruption caused by China's “National Sword” initiative, about a year and a half ago, when, practically overnight, they stopped taking almost all of the world's recyclables. New water quality standards, and a lot of other factors, combined to lead the Chinese to require almost impossible cleanliness standards for recyclables.

Long story, and I can fill in more, or you can read about it almost anywhere online, but suddenly it's costing a whole lot of money to dispose of our recyclables – if we can find a MRF to take them. Right now, it's (a lot) more expensive to take a ton of recyclables to a MRF than it is to take a ton of trash to a landfill. Otsego County charges commercial haulers $55/ton to bring recyclables to the TS s, although citizens can still bring recyclables to the TS s and put them in the bins for free.

There's no end in sight, and although alternate strategies for storing and processing recyclables are slowly emerging, the fiscal difficulties will continue for some time. SWEC has recently authorized raising the tipping fee a couple of dollars, and has raised the recyclables fee to $75/ton, starting 1/1/20. This will ease, but not solve, the problem.

You are probably aware that any time the County raises the cost of anything, it's a high-profile and difficult action. These fee increases (and another increase – charging $12 for any TV or monitor) were debated at really great length. The focus of the conversations was how to apply the increase to those who use the service, and how to incentivize certain kinds of behavior, such as cleaning your recyclables. The tip fee is charged to commercial haulers, who may or may not pass on any increases to their customers (you can still bring a bag of garbage to the TS for $3). We can also manipulate the size of the solid waste user fee, which is an annual fee charged to each household in the county. Larger organizations (including non-profits, which pay no property taxes) pay multiples of the user fee, depending on size. Raising the user fee (now $15) spreads the cost among all County citizens pretty evenly. We raised the user fee last year. Eventually, we decided that we wanted larger users to pay a bigger part of the increase (and we didn't want to raise the user fee two years in a row).

I guess I've gone on and on about solid waste – something that was farthest from my mind when I first ran for the Board. This is a jack-of-all-trades job – and not for the first time, I look forward to a County Administrator to bring some professional knowledge and experience to each piece of this job.

I've only scratched the surface here – and I'll write again about some of the details – but it's something that will continue to need to be addressed in 2020 and beyond. Let me know what parts of this you'd like to know more about.

By the way – Delaware County Solid Waste will have an open house on November 9. Delaware has been way ahead of other rural counties in bringing creative initiatives to fruition in this area – including operating their own MRF. Even though I'll soon be done with all this, I'll be going to the open house, just because I've heard so much about them for so long.

Life on the Board VIII - Miscellaneous 1

Some odds and ends while I have a moment (just got back from a week and a half away) -

Purchasing: About five years ago, or so, we began the process of outsourcing our purchasing management to Onondaga County, based on a relationship that a one-term Board member had with somebody in that organization. It's been a very, very long and difficult transition which has only really settled in during the last year or so.

Onondaga County (including the City of Syracuse) has a pretty massive purchasing system, and had never collaborated with a County before. We pay them $30,000/year for the service, which is about 1/3 of what it would cost us to create one position here in Otsego County. Before all this, each Department pretty much did their own purchasing (there was a half-time clerk in the Personnel office who did it for a while, but that didn't work out). The transition took so long because change is hard, and because Departments didn't like giving up autonomy, and because Onondaga County took some time to learn how to integrate us into their pretty well-oiled machine. It didn't help that the Onondaga County Purchasing Director left his position about a year into the collaboration, to work for NYS.

However, all things considered, everyone's been working hard to make this work, and Andrew Trombley, the new Onondaga County Purchasing Director, has been very responsive. As you may know, there are a lot of restrictions on municipal purchasing, to ensure fairness with the public's money and to restrict corruption, and when done right, purchasing is just awash in bureaucracy and takes forever. But there's a great advantage to doing it right, and it's usually worth the wait. We haven't heard about any real problems in this area for over a year.

Vehicles: Otsego County uses a lot of vehicles, and most of them by far are used by DSS: caseworkers are expected to be able to access any home in the county if necessary, transport out-of-county for a lot of reasons, etc. DSS has had a transportation coordinator for a long time because of this.

General and routine maintenance was done by the Highway Department until staff cuts during the economic downturn left Highway with half the staff they had ten years earlier, and no time to work on County cars.

A few years ago the Public Works Committee started looking at outsourcing our vehicle purchases and maintenance. I believe that there were two (three?) proposals, and we chose Enterprise. They lease us cars on a schedule, cycling them in and out on a four-year rotation. The best estimates they and the Treasurer can provide suggest that we'll save money. We've been doing this for about a year or so, and so far, so good. We have control over whether we keep the car (extend the lease) or not, which is a good thing: Enterprise's schedule doesn't really take into account how the cars are used. There's a hazmat truck that Emergency Services uses for specific situations. It's five years old, so Enterprise wanted us to replace it – but it's only got 16,000 miles on it. In addition, DSS – which has been making decisions about cars for decades – is requesting that a few of their cars be kept another year or so, for a variety of reasons.

Everyone agrees that we won't know if this whole system is cost-effective until a whole four-year leasing cycle is over.

AIM payments: I am not familiar with AIM payments (Aid and Incentives to Municipalities), mostly because it is State funding to cities, towns and villages for them to do with as they see fit. However, this year, there's a new way to pay for them:  County sales-tax payments from the State will be reduced by the amount of the AIM payment totals within each County. In other words, the State no longer has to pay AIM – the County does.

The justification here, such as it is, is that the new Internet sales tax payments will make up the difference. We'll see; I'm betting not. This is generally seen by counties as a very bad thing.

Some other NYS initiatives that will cost the County money – and for which the state has provided some compensatory funding :

• Early voting: It costs more than I realized to run an election, and when you keep polling places open for over a week (October 26 through November 3 this year) before the regular Election Day, it's going to cost a whole lot more. Early voting in Otsego County will only be available at the Board of Elections office in the Meadows County Office Building, but will probably be expanded in future years.
• Raise the Age: This initiative moves the age of adult responsibility from 16 to 17 (October 1, 2018) and then to 18 (October 1, 2019). So as of next week, individuals charged with a crime who are 18 and younger will be treated as minors, not adults, by the court system. The big cost here is if someone who is 18 or under needs to be incarcerated. This is rare in the world of minors convicted of a crime, but by raising the age, the possibility increases.  Of course, Probation and DSS, and others, will now be taking on caseloads of 16, 17 and !8 year olds in a variety of their programs.
• Court of First Appearance (CAFA) and cashless bail – and other justice system reforms – I would check with members of the Public Safety Committee for more details.

And, finally, Otsego County is, obviously, part of the Susquehanna River watershed, since we boast one of the sources of the river, Lake Otsego. Counties in this watershed, in NY, PA and MD, are members of (I cannot for the life of me remember the name of the organization), and are responsible for a certain level of water quality reaching the Chesapeake Bay. The Otsego County Soil and Water District does a lot of work in this area, including buffer tree plantings and environmental education in the agricultural sector (fertilizer runoff and sediment are the biggest problems).