Waste district OKs recycling plan
The Canton Repository
BOLIVAR - The delay in agreeing to a waste disposal and recycling plan took nearly as many years as the number of words in the local waste district’s name.
The Stark-Tuscarawas-Wayne Joint Solid Waste Management District board voted Thursday to authorize the board’s chairman to approve the 258-page plan — more than seven years after the deadline.
“This issue should have been put behind us long ago,” said Tuscarawas County Commissioner Kerry Metzger, who joined the board in 2003. “It’s time to move on.”
The plan, starting in 2009, will implement a new recycling grant program where communities that recycle more get more funding from the district, while those who recycle less will get less money. The district, which receives its money from fees levied on each ton of waste dumped in its landfills, will give Canton $700,000 to set up a curbside recycling program next year.
To save money, it would also cut from five to three the number of Stark County sheriff’s deputies the district pays to oversee inmate litter collection, ticket overloaded or improperly tarped garbage trucks and catch illegal dumpers. It also consolidates the county’s recycling offices under the district’s control.
YEARS OF ARGUMENTS
For years, approval of an update to the district’s 1993 plan, due in 1999, was delayed by bickering among commissioners of the three counties. At issue: whether the plan should include district funding of an Interstate 77 ramp at Gracemont Street SW.
Stark County commissioners, who favored it, said it would allow garbage trucks in Pike Township going to the nearby Countywide Recycling & Disposal Facility to bypass Sherman Church and Dueber avenues and other local roads. Residents have long resented the constant traffic of loud, heavy garbage trucks and feared a deadly collision.
Tuscarawas County commissioners feared building a ramp would increase the flow of waste to the landfill and boost the chance waste from the landfill would contaminate the water supplies of northern Tuscarawas communities.
Because plan approval required at least two commissioners in each county to back it, each side vetoed each other’s version of the plan. The arguments got so contentious that Stark County tried, unsuccessfully, to convince the Ohio Supreme Court to let it secede from the district.
EPA TAKES ACTION
After mediation talks between the three counties broke down in 2003, the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency announced the next year that it would impose its own plan on the district.
Backed by the counties’ state legislators, the waste district board united against EPA control, finally approved its own plan and threatened to come down to Columbus and lobby Gov. Bob Taft to stop the imposition. In August 2005, the EPA agreed to negotiate the plan with the district and allow the district to pass its own landfill regulation and fund the Gracemont ramp.
District board members said that the EPA in the negotiations surprisingly listened to district officials. The EPA softened its sink-or-swim recycling plan and reduced the number of deputies cut.
The district can submit an update to the plan in about three years. If ratified by local communities and approved by the EPA, the district would regain control of its waste disposal and recycling planning. But the recycling incentive plan has to last at least another three years.
“I think it’s the best we could hope for,” said Stark County Commissioner Richard Regula, the board’s chairman, who attended his last waste district meeting as a commissioner. After failing to be re-elected, Regula’s term ends Dec. 31.
ODOR STILL THERE
Separately, David Held, the district’s executive director, said Thursday that he has received 21 complaints about odors coming from Countywide since the landfill’s EPA-imposed Dec. 15 deadline to fix the problem.
The nauseating odor could be smelled on I-77 by motorists driving by the landfill Thursday afternoon.
EPA inspectors are expected to check for the odor until at least Dec. 29. EPA spokesman Mike Settles said based on their observations, EPA Director Joe Koncelik will, before he leaves Dec. 29, recommend to the Stark County Board of Health whether to renew Countywide’s operating license, suspend it or wait for further action.
Settles said even if the board of health suspended the license, the landfill could continue to operate while an appeal of the suspension was pending. When asked why the EPA couldn’t shut down the landfill itself if the odor persisted, Settles said state law gives local boards of health jurisdiction over landfill’s operating licenses.
