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.