Litter patrol may be reduced
The Canton Repository
BOLIVAR - The state is trying to reduce funding for sheriff’s deputies whose job it is to police littering and overloaded garbage trucks.
That’s why Stark County Sheriff Tim Swanson spoke Friday at a meeting of the local waste district. Swanson wants the money to keep flowing.
“My big question is, the money that they do save, what are they going to do with it?” he asked.
The Stark-Tuscarawas-Wayne Joint Solid Waste Management District gives Swanson’s office at least $359,000 a year from landfill dumping fees to pay for five deputies to patrol around area landfills, Interstate 77 and Route 30. They look for garbage trucks that are speeding, overloaded or inadequately covered. The deputies also try to catch people in the act of illegal dumping and supervise inmates who pick up litter on the side of highways.
But the nine county commissioners that sit on the district board have lost the power to determine how much the district funds those deputies. In 2004, the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency took control of the drafting of the district’s recycling plan and much of its spending, after the district failed to submit a required plan by a 1999 deadline.
Facing protests by local officials, the EPA agreed to come up with a new plan by the end of this year through negotiations with the waste district.
During those talks, the EPA pushed to slash the number of litter patrol deputies from five to one.
“Having five (such) sheriff deputies in one county is very much unprecedented in the state,” said the EPA’s planning unit supervisor, Andrew Booker.
A county usually has only one, he said. But Booker told the board that he would be willing to compromise and cut the number of deputies to three.
Booker said the EPA wouldn’t be trying to reduce the number of deputies if the district had met the state’s recycling goals, but he said the district has a history of funding programs that have little to do with recycling. The EPA wants to take the $125,000 a year saved by cutting the number of deputies and spend it on recycling programs.
Stark County Commissioner Gayle Jackson didn’t like what she was hearing.
“We feel we won’t do with less than five,” she said. “I say a compromise would be between three and five, and that would be four.”
Swanson said any cuts in funding for litter deputies would not result in layoffs. He said he has the money to transfer them to patrol or jail duty, where they’d probably be paid from the county’s general fund.
Containing the bad odor
EPA Environmental Manager Kurt Princic told the board that he expects a plastic cap, almost 30 acres in size, will be fully installed at the Countywide Recycling & Disposal Facility in Pike Township within 30 to 45 days to help contain a bad odor. He said it’s not yet known how effective it would be.
Princic said the odor appears to be the result of a large environmental cleanup in the mid-1990s. An aluminum foundry owned by Barmet in Uhrichsville dumped aluminum salt cake waste improperly into about 13 acres by the foundry.
When the EPA ordered a cleanup, Barmet shipped 300,000 tons of the waste to Countywide. Over the years, the waste reacted with liquid from other solid waste, resulting in heat and a noxious, smelly gas with hydrogen and ammonia that has made the lives of surrounding residents miserable.
Combining recycling programs
The district board also approved the consolidation of the district’s three recycling programs, which were funded by district grants but operated by Tuscarawas County, Wayne County and the Stark County Regional Planning Commission. The district formally hired the 10 employees of those offices, effective Jan. 1.
David Held, the waste district’s executive director, said the consolidation of the offices, recycling contracts and promotional campaigns are expected to save $300,000 a year.
