Landfill rates to increase Jan. 1

PALMER — Rates to dump trash at the Mat-Su Borough’s central landfill are going up by 26 percent Jan. 1, 2015, and some companies say they’re feeling the pinch.

“The landfill is our largest expense by far, it outweighs even my truck payments,” said Phil Horton, owner of Denali Refuse. He said dump fees are close to half of his operating expenses.

“So, yeah, we have to raise our rates because of it,” Horton said.

Fees currently stand at $86 per ton. Starting next year, that’s going up to $110.

The Mat-Su Borough says this is just the last in a series of rate hikes designed to bring the fees in line with the costs of doing business.

“I guess how I would describe it is, from about 2001 until 2011 or 2012, there were no fee increases for the landfill and the landfill enterprise fund was operating at a deficit, a pretty huge deficit,” said Mat-Su Borough Public Works Director Terry Dolan.

The borough started raising rates in 2012 with the idea that the landfill would pay for itself. Even with a series of raises in rates, Dolan said, the borough still had to subsidize operations there by $600,000 last year.

“This last increase is the last one to get us caught up,” he said.

Future increases would be what Dolan refers to as “cost of living increases” — just small bumps to take care of rising costs, instead of the big hikes the borough has been implementing.

But trash haulers like Horton point out that they don’t cost the borough what other customers do. They use automatic scales and dump the trash themselves. By contrast, a person going to the dump himself has to deal with a clerk and dumps in a trailer the borough hauls out to the main trash cell. A person going to a transfer site like those in Butte or Big Lake also works with a clerk but costs even more since the borough has to hire a contractor to haul trash from the transfer site to the central landfill.

“We run so much more efficiently than having people go to transfer sites and to the landfill,” Horton said.

Dolan said those transfer sites are a significant piece of the puzzle. Rates at the central landfill subsidize dumping at the transfer sites.

“Our transfer sites really operate at a major loss — for Big Lake and Butte it’s in the $600,000 a year range for those two transfer sites,” he said.

Currently, people pay everything from $1 for up to two bags of garbage to $11 for three to six bags. And a pickup load of garbage can cost anywhere from $22 to $44 to dump. The borough has some unattended transfer sites — like the Dumpster in the Lake Louise area — that are actually free. But, with lower volumes and no attendant on duty, sites like that cost the borough just $30,000 a year, Dolan said.

Still, though, he said there are perils to raising the rates at transfer sites.

“How much can we really charge at these transfer sites before people start throwing their trash into the ditch?” Dolan said. “That’s the real question.”

The transfer sites were actually the solution to that problem. All the way up until the early 1980s, Dolan said, the borough had unlined landfills that people could just dump whatever they wanted into.

When the Environmental Protection Agency made that illegal, the borough had to build a lined, central landfill. Each time they fill up a cell it costs $4 million to $6 million to line a new cell and an additional $2 million to $3 million to put a cap on the old one.

Since it’s so pricey, it didn’t make sense to build a bunch of small dumps to service neighborhoods. Instead, the borough implemented the transfer sites.

But even with the transfer site system, the problems of the old dumpsites remain. The borough has had to cover them up and install wells to monitor water quality around them.

“Yesterday we got a letter from (Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation) telling us that there are toxic chemicals seeping out of the old dumpsite that is under the Smith Ballfields out there off of (Knik-Goose Bay Road),” Dolan said. “There’s a possibility that we may have to go out there and excavate some of the trash out there.”

He said that the letter said there were diesel-like contaminants found in a nearby monitoring well.

“This note we have from DEC says they have tested the water in some nearby drinking water wells and found no chemical presence in there,” Dolan said. “The chemicals that are coming out of that dumpsite are leaching into a different aquifer.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.