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County starts trash talks
By Carole Cloudwalker
This document was published online on Monday, January 21, 2008
Planning has started for an estimated $2.7 million lined landfill in Cody that could be completed in two years.
Park County Landfill Manager Dave Hoffert said he is playing the old game of “Beat the Clock” to relieve the county’s pressing problem of burgeoning garbage at the Cody site.
The current Cody landfill is beginning to fill an “imaginary” line 10 feet above its original design, Hoffert said,
Planning is necessary because the state Department of Environmental Quality has dictated that no new “cells” at the Cody facility can be used to receive trash unless they are lined.
The county likely will have to borrow state funds with a 20-year payback period to build the lined cell, Hoffert said.
The money would be repaid through an approximate $5 per ton increase in fees. That would bring the per-ton cost to $65 from the current $60, he said.
Landfill issues were the topic of a recent meeting and will be discussed again Wednesday, Jan. 23, when a decision by the commissioners could send Hoffert to Casper later this week to begin negotiations with the DEQ concerning the lined cell.
The situation will have spin-offs for other communities and consumers in the county, Hoffert said.
“When the lined cell is ready, all the county’s (household waste) will go to Cody,” he said.
That means while construction waste materials still can be left at landfills in Clark and Powell, no Municipal Solid Waste, or “MSW,” will be permitted at those sties, and the Meeteetse landfill will close completely, Hoffert added.
This all will come together by 2010, he said.
“It will take that long to get the liner built,” he added.
While the county is struggling to build a new lined cell at the Cody site to last 10-15 years, Hoffert also is at work on a plan that would carry the entire county - and possibly some adjoining counties - for about a decade as well.
“We’ve been talking for two years about a solid waste management plan,” Hoffert said. “Now everything’s in place and the effort is going forward.”
He and consultants Myra Peak of Peak Engineering and Roy Holm of Holm-Blough and Co. hosted a meeting last week at the courthouse aimed at receiving input from entities, including recyclers and other people interested in using landfills or diverting items away from them to save money.
“The goal of the meeting was to tell jurisdictions for each landfill what will occur,” Hoffert said.
“Now it appears we will end up with a lined facility in Cody, but there is no plan to line anything else” in the county.
Hoffert said about 49 other landfills across the state also are looking for alternatives to implement by July 2009, the end of the designated planning period laid out by the DEQ.
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