For a few hours last Monday night, Marvin Harrison was out of a job.
Harrison, the manager and lone employee of the North Arkansas Board of Regional Sanitation, commonly known as the NABORS Landfill, said he was contacted by Jeff Crockett, chairman of the Ozark Mountain Regional Solid Waste District, which owns the landfill. Crockett told him the district was simply out of money.
"I knew I was going to lose my job eventually, of course," Harrison said Friday. "But I'll stay here and make sure everything gets done to the best of my ability, until there's no longer a job here."
From the moment in 2005 that the district purchased the landfill, located near Mountain Home in Baxter County, the landfill struggled to stay financially solvent. After several years of increasing fees on trash haulers, the district's board of directors voted in October 2012 to default on the $12.3 million bond issue from Bank of the Ozarks that originally funded the purchase. A month later, the board voted to stop accepting garbage at the landfill, terminating its only source of revenue.
Since that decision, the board has still had to fund the collection and removal of leachate, the toxic byproduct of rainwater filtering through the open garbage cells at the site. Crockett said the board spends about $20,000 each month for Harrison's salary and the removal of leachate, which is transported to a wastewater treatment plant in Springfield, Mo. If leachate isn't removed from a landfill, it can contaminate area groundwater.
Just before noon last Monday, Crockett emailed the district board members to say the district was out of money, with several loads of leachate still needing immediate removal from the landfill.
"We will no longer be able to pay for Marvin to be at the landfill or to haul any more leachate!" Crockett said in the email. "They are hauling the last load of leachate right now and need to haul three more that will not be hauled! The electric bills outstanding will not be paid so I am sure power will be turned off shortly! I have advised [the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality] and so they are aware and will hopefully step in."
Later that afternoon, the department's director, Teresa Marks, emailed Crockett to say that it would accelerate the district's annual recycling grant disbursement of $138,730, originally scheduled to be paid Sept. 1.
Under Act 1330, passed by the state Legislature earlier this year, solid waste districts were given far more leeway in the use of recycling grant funds. The department's deputy director, Ryan Benefield, said respective districts are free to spend the recycling grant funds at their discretion without seeking approval from the department. The Ozark Mountain district is, however, under a court order to use whatever money is available to sustain the removal of leachate from the landfill.
Department spokesman Katherine Benenati said a check for the disbursement was cut and mailed Thursday.
While the promise of the disbursement helped put Harrison back to work -- he returned to the landfill Tuesday morning and oversaw the removal of two truckloads of leachate Wednesday -- the lump sum funding is a short-term solution. Even ignoring the estimated $4.5 million it will cost to adequately close and "cap" the landfill, the basic day-to-day operation of NABORS will burn through the recycling grant funds by March, Crockett said.
Benefield said the department plans to take over operation of the landfill well before then, and be on its way to permanently closing the facility as well. In March, the Legislature passed a bill authorizing the department to access the Landfill Post-Closure Trust Fund to begin permanently closing the landfill.
Although the department filed suit against the solid waste district in February 2013, seeking $2.2 million to supplement the $2.3 million in "financial assurances" the district was required to hold in reserve for the closure of the facility, the matter became complicated when board members filed for bankruptcy -- a first for a solid waste district in the state -- in January.
The department eventually won its suit in May, requiring the district to hand over all available financial assurance funds to the department and allowing the department to "exercise its statutory authority to expend these funds for site stabilization, corrective action, closure and post-closure care."
The department will begin accepting bids today for a field services contractor to run the day-to-day operation of the landfill, Benefield said, adding that the department hopes to have someone in place by mid-September. The department will also hire a consultant to design the final closure plans for the landfill, Benefield said. The hiring process for this position will require legislative review and approval and will take considerably longer, he said.
Benefield said early cost estimates for permanently closing the landfill were about $5 million, although the final bill could be "significantly more," depending on whether any previously unknown environmental complications are discovered. Benefield said there is no cap on the amount of money the department is authorized to withdraw from the Post-Closure Landfill Trust Fund for the closure of the landfill, although any expenditure will require legislative approval.
While the department's takeover of the operation and closure of the landfill may alleviate one of the solid waste district's most pressing headaches, its board members will still need to deal with its outstanding debts.
In May, Bank of the Ozarks, the district's chief creditor, filed an injunction seeking to halt the proceedings because the district still had the capacity to repay its bond debts by taxing the personal property of residents within the six-county area served by the district. On Tuesday, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Ben Barry sided with Bank of the Ozarks and dismissed the district's bankruptcy filing.
Melinda Caldwell, executive director of the district, said she was unsure what direction the district would take in the wake of the bankruptcy ruling.
"What happens next, I don't know," Caldwell said.
NW News on 08/11/2014