08/31/2007

County board rejects waste plan

By Brian McGillivary

bmcgillivary@record-eagle.com

TRAVERSE CITY — The Grand Traverse County Board of Commissioners discarded a plan to address the county's future trash problems after three years of study and $140,000 in expenses.

Commissioners on Wednesday voiced an array of sometimes conflicting objections to a solid waste planning committee's proposed solid waste plan. The 7-2 rejection left some to wonder if the board will ever reach consensus on county-wide trash and recycling matters.

"Right now I can't name any specific objections to the plan because the board was all over the place,” said county administrator Dennis Aloia.

Commissioners Larry Fleis, Bruce Hooper, Addison "Sonny” Wheelock, Larry Inman, Christine Maxbauer, Dick Thomas and Margaret Underwood voted to reject the plan.

Commissioners Wayne Schmidt and Herb Lemcool favored the committee's plan.

The vote prompted frustration from at least one solid waste committee member; the group developed the plan over three years and the county spent $140,000 on studies, consultants and staff wages while it compiled the plan.

"If the county board thought we were going in the wrong direction, it would have been very helpful if it told us this during the process instead of waiting until the very end,” said Scott Howard, a local attorney and committee member. "I should be surprised, but I'm not. These are the same people who want to e-mail the sun.”

Howard referred to comments made last spring by three Grand Traverse commissioners who don't believe humans contribute to climate change.

It's not clear what comes next, or if the board will scrap the entire plan and start over. Board members asked Aloia to set up a joint meeting with the solid waste committee, but Aloia wants the board to first meet and define what it wants changed.

Schmidt said the plan provided flexibility the board requested in an updated solid waste plan; others wanted it to give the county more definitive direction on such things as how to replace the way the county funds recycling.

The state requires each county to have a solid waste plan that sets goals for recycling, options on how the county will dispose of its trash and strategies for meeting those goals. Similar to a master plan for zoning, any recycling or trash rules must be compatible with the solid waste plan.

The solid waste committee met over the past three years and its 14 representatives included local government officials, environmentalists, trash haulers and members of the public.

The proposed changes offered the county board a wide choice of options to meet its goals, some of which were objected to by the trash-hauling industry.

"It seemed there were a lot of commissioners parroting the concerns of the solid waste industry,” Howard said. "They seemed to have a lot of influence on the commissioners' positions.”

Trash haulers, who held four seats on the solid waste committee, criticized the plan, the process and county staff who directed the process. They objected to removing criteria to locate a landfill in the county and complained that the county's Resource Recovery department's budget is bloated.

Maxbauer wants that department reorganized to create more efficiency.

Inman said the board should discuss whether the county should continue funding its recycling education and household hazardous waste disposal programs. He also wants to revisit allowing a landfill to be sited in the county, as does Underwood.

"I want to go back and readdress the whole plan, and not just bits and pieces of it,” Inman said.