End The Fighting, Expand The Landfill
It is time for the fighting over the Chautauqua County Landfill to end.
As we have previously written, we’re not sure Chautauqua County or the town of Ellery has had much of a choice in this matter. This issue was largely decided in the 1970s when county officials decided it was in the environment’s best interests to have one landfill for Chautauqua County rather than a mishmash of 40 small, largely unregulated dumps located throughout the county. The process undertaken then resulted in the landfill being placed on 83 acres of land surrounded by 700 uninhabited acres of land in Ellery. Then, in the 1990s, the issue was decided again when legislators defeated a push to privatize the landfill because it was losing money. Rather than sell, legislators decided to keep the landfill and accept out-of-county waste to help keep the costs to operate the landfill lower for Chautauqua County residents. In the years since that decision, the landfill has become profitable through both acceptance of outside waste and revenue generated from a methane-to-electric generation system that sells electricity produced at the landfill.
County officials have bent over backward over the years to limit the landfill’s hours of operation, limit when trucks come and go and to take in only as much out-of-county waste as is needed to keep rates low for Chautauqua County residents. There have been no environmental incidents — such as leakage of hazardous toxins into the groundwater or the release of dangerous pollutants into the air — by the facility. State and federal regulations ensure the landfill isn’t harming Ellery residents.
Not expanding the Chautauqua County landfill will negatively impact hundreds of thousands of people in a six-county area because contracting with private companies could triple the regional rate for landfill disposal services. Contracting with privately-owned landfills will also result in new taxes or fees for all Chautauqua County residents while creating additional strain on the county budget. Eliminating out-of-county waste would decrease the need to expand the landfill, but it could also lead to a repeat of the 1990s when the landfill was hemorrhaging money. Moving the landfill, likewise, makes no sense. Figures provided by the county put the cost well over $100 million to move the landfill and rebuild all of the infrastructure that has been assembled at the Ellery site over the past 50 years.
Nearly $450,000 in taxpayer money has been spent paying for lawsuits fighting the expansion. No more money should be spent. It’s time to expand the landfill and focus on more pressing issues facing our county.
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