Four towns to consider fee for county chipper use

Five of the 16 towns in the county have responded to a letter from the county asking if they would pay a daily fee to rent the county chipper after the grant money currently paying for it dries up in December.

Lamont, Palouse, LaCrosse, and St. John reported they were willing to hear more about the program. Garfield said no.

“I’m trying to make it [the program] sustainable,” said Judi Dunn-Gray, county waste reduction coordinator.

The fee, projected at $250 to $300 a day, would pay for equipment, fuel, and the labor to run the chipper for eight hours a day.

The town of Palouse uses the chipper quite frequently. Two hundred and one people have permits to use the recycle facilities in Palouse.

A pile of yard brush and trees builds up every few days or weeks at the Palouse recycling yard, said city public works superintendent Dwayne Griffin.

“He is here [county chipper hand] probably 15 to 20 times a year. Usually it’s from anywhere between four to six hours to chip the pile,” Griffin said. “All depends on what kind of material we get and how it’s stacked.”

When the county initially received the $130,000 grant from the Department of Ecology, towns signed onto an interlocal agreement saying they would help supply part of the labor and all the fuel the chipper needed when they used the machine.

Dunn-Gray said they will put together their sustainable program if enough towns say they would rent the chipper. Cities would then sign on to a second interlocal agreement agreeing to pay the county for their daily use of the machine.

Oakesdale mayor Russ Rickett doesn’t yet know if they will agree to another interlocal agreement.

“They kind of suckered us into this and now they are just backing away from it. And now they aren’t making money available to us to continue providing this service,” said Rickett, of the DOE giving the grant to the county and then letting it expire in December. Oakesdale is currently building its own recycling center and so far has not used the chipper.

Palouse city council Sept. 8 discussed the possiblity of asking citizens to pay a fee to get their yard waste chipped if they have to rent the chipper.

Given the amount of times they use it, their annual charge could easily be in the thousands of dollars.

“It’s easy to say it would be in that ball park,” said Palouse Mayor Michael Echanove.

As far as a long-term plan for a sustainable county program, Dunn-Gray said help for this could come from several places.

The chipper the county bought is expected to last 20 to 30 years with the right upkeep.

If cities continue to pay the actual usage fee, the county’s half of the program would pay for one part-time employee (currently a college student working without benefits) to run the machine, the gas to get the chipper out to a city, and parts.

The money to do that, Dunn-Gray said, is still coming out of the $130,000 grant. When that runs out in December, the county will then rely on funds from its solid waste fund.

County public works director Mark Storey said the county is also considering having an employee from the transfer station double as the chipper operator in the future.

Further grants from the DOE could be a possibility, said Nancy Lucas, a grant officer with the Waste 2 Resources program, with the DOE eastern regional office in Spokane. While Whitman County can never again receive a grant that specifically funds the chipper program, Lucas said, there are other grants that can add to the program.

For example, the county could apply for a truck to haul the chipper around, instead of providing its own. The county could also apply for a grant that helps to expand a composting center, Lucas said.