Editor’s note: Do you want answers to questions about the Golden Triangle? Each week, Dispatch reporters set out to explain or update a timely, practical issue. Email your question to [email protected].

The city’s landfill off Armstrong Road is running out of space, leading officials to start thinking about what to do next.

Why does the city have a landfill? What are the options for expansion or finding a new location? What happens if the landfill runs out of space before anything is done?

What’s the purpose for the city landfill?

The city leases about 23 acres just east of the city from a private landowner. For more than 30 years, it has served as a disposal site for rubbish and construction waste, which either public works picks up or customers carry out there to dump for a fee.

Chief Financial Officer Jim Brigham said the city budgets $272,000 to operate the landfill each year, but it only generates about $120,000 in revenue.

The landfill does not accept household garbage, as that is collected at residences and businesses and taken to Golden Triangle Regional Landfill in Oktibbeha County, just south of West Point.

What are the options for expanding or finding a new location?

This is not a new question, and there seems to be no easy answer.

In 2013, the city commissioned a study to explore its options, said City Engineer Kevin Stafford, the North Mississippi manager for the Neel-Schaffer firm. That study presented three options, but by far the easiest and most economical was to amend its permit to raise the landfill’s ceiling level – essentially allowing the city to stack rubbish higher.

Stafford said the city at the time expected the measure to buy the landfill another five years of useful life. But soon after, industries stopped bringing as much waste, due to closure or finding another place to dump. Lowndes County, one of the landfill’s biggest customers at the time, started dumping rubbish at the regional landfill.

That further extended the city landfill’s useful life, which now Stafford estimates at 2 1/2 years. It should be just enough time to figure out what to do next.

Stafford is working on “freshening up” cost estimates and details from the 2013 study and presenting the council with more updated information soon.

Vertical expansion is maxed out and no longer an option, Stafford said. Horizontal expansion won’t work either, because the current site is “pretty much surrounded by roads and drainage,” Stafford said. Even if the city could secure surrounding land, moving roads and other infrastructure would prove too costly.

That leaves, at minimum, two other – also very costly – options: closing the landfill and “getting out of the business;” or finding another spot for a landfill.

Stafford said closing the landfill means placing a soil cap over all the rubbish so none of it is exposed, grassing it over and closing the permit. He estimates that could cost between $100,000 and $200,000.

But the city would take on operational costs for picking up and disposing rubbish elsewhere, all while forfeiting any revenue it would make at its own facility. In 2013, operational costs for this option were estimated at $600,000 a year, Stafford said.

Getting a new landfill, Stafford said, would take 18 months to two years to purchase property, design and build the landfill and get the proper permits. The 2013 study put that cost at $1.3 million. In today’s dollars, Stafford ballparked it at $2.4 million.

The old study identified a handful of viable options to build a new landfill. Part of the new study will revisit if any of those sites are still an option and if there are others.

You want a rural spot with lower land value that has good soil, drainage and topography, Stafford said.

“You don’t want to build a landfill on top of a mountain. … You want as much of a hole as you can start with,” he said.

Public Works Director Casey Bush said he prefers having a new landfill.

“It would be better for the citizens to have a place closer to dump,” Bush said.

Otherwise, it will cost his guys more to haul it to Oktibbeha County, and it would likely cause citizens to create more illegal dumping sites on roadsides – something that is already a problem.

What happens if the landfill runs out of room?

It already has, in a sense, more than once.

Stafford said the landfill is “one big storm away from running out of space” at all times. Those big storms have come, and public works has improvised.

After the February 2019 tornado, the city gathered rubbish at the landfill and carried it to the regional site. After a ferocious spring storm this year, the city leased an incinerator to burn downed limbs, trees and excess rubbish.

“If everything that was being produced from storms and normal users (annually) was still rolling forward, they would have run out of useful life a few years ago,” Stafford said. “… So some things have been done in these high-use periods to keep from shutting them out of business.”

Stafford plans to research if incineration is a good permanent option for the landfill, but he doubts it.

Leasing the machine this year cost about $20,000 for four months, Bush said. Buying one would be a much larger investment.

“I know people incinerate, but I don’t know anyone who 100% incinerates,” Stafford said. “What that tells me is it probably isn’t economical. But I don’t know that for sure.”

Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.

READER FAVORITES

• 

  Justices upholds aggravated assault, attempted robbery conviction

  By Cadence Harvey • 2 days ago

• 

  Historic Preservation: West Point’s historic Northside School poised for new future

  By Braden Simmons • 2 days ago