By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
St. Joseph is attempting to deal with a landfill that is filling up quickly with little room to spare.
St. Joseph City Manager Mike Schumacher says the city will have to address revenue soon, because landfill rates haven’t gone up since 2004.
“I’m a pretty big believer in the free market and capitalism,” Schumacher tells host Barry Birr on the KFEQ Hotline. “At the end of the day, our landfill sells a product and a service and that is for commercial, for-profit businesses to dispose of waste. It’s an important component to the community. We most certainly want to support our for-profit business. But at the same time, we need to make sure that we’re planning for the future.”
Before planning for the future, the city must deal with a present crisis.
The St. Joseph landfill is made up of 14 cells. As each cell fills with trash, a new cell must open. Cell 7 is nearly full. The city has asked permission from the Missouri Department of Natural Resources to pile trash higher and place more around the edges of the cell while it develops a new cell. DNR is considering the city’s request.
Meanwhile, the city has asked trash haulers to reduce their loads to the landfill by 30% this month. A new, three-tiered rate structure begins next month. That rate increase will likely not be enough. City officials plan to further review the rate structure.
The St. Joseph City Council has entered a $1.1 million contract with M-CON to develop Cell 8 as quickly as possible.
“There are still capacity issues and if Mother Nature does not cooperate, there’s still going to be challenges on the horizon,” according to Schumacher. “I want to make sure everyone understands that; that we are building Cell 8, another cell inside the landfill, at a less than ideal time of year. We didn’t have any choice. It was time to move, so we moved.”
Schumacher says the city needs to address the emergency situation it faces now, then move to expand landfill capacity.
“It was a short term, we need to move now and get Cell 8 going,” Schumacher says. “And then there’s a longer-term business model, if you will, that the city, our organization, is going to have to make some decisions and view that landfill as an enterprise fund. It has to be self- sustainable. You have to have sufficient funding for your employees, equipment, overall costs, and also planning for the future.”
Schumacher wants the city to immediately move to develop Cell 9 as soon as Cell 8 opens.
At-Large city councilmember, Jeff Schomburg, acknowledges the city failed to address a landfill nearing capacity in time.
“The city kind of dropped the ball on that,” Schomburg tells Birr on an earlier appearance on the KFEQ Hotline. “Maybe we should’ve been doing this emergency thing two years ago, once we found out that, hey, we’re not going to get this thing up and running in time.”
Schomburg says the city needs to learn from its past mistakes on managing the landfill.
“Go back and say, hey, what’d we do wrong here, what can we do in the future to not do this again.”
The St. Joseph landfill serves a four-county region, which includes Buchanan County, Andrew County, Clinton County, and Daviess County. It can accept trash from other counties as well. It is one of only 17 landfills in Missouri, all regulated by DNR.
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