Talking Trash: Locals voice their opinions on trash site consolidation

Local residents finally had their say.

After months of battling county officials over a proposed county plan to consolidate the Bigfork and Lakeside trash collection sites into one site in Somers, locals lashed out at the Flathead County solid waste board last week in Kalispell.

The meeting was at the Foy’s Community Center at Herron Park. About 50 people attended the meeting to speak before the Flathead County solid waste board and various stakeholders in the county’s plan to consolidate trash collection sites. The stakeholders included the consultants who were hired for the study, commercial garbage collectors, a county commissioner, and local residents.

Representatives from CH2M Hill, the Miami, Fla., firm hired to perform the consolidation study, spoke first about how the various opinions and criteria are scored in “MODA, or multi-objective decision analysis,” the decision-making process that the county is using for the green box sites.

That “MODA” information was compared to a family that wanted to buy a new car but had to balance various needs and wants — from the teenager who wanted a hybrid vehicle to the dad who wanted a pickup. The scientific jargon seemed to fly over the heads of the participants, who wanted solid answers, not theories or a talk on process.

The public then had their say.

Lakeside and Bigfork have their own trash-collection sites, and there is a site in Somers on Montana Highway 82.  Removal of the Bigfork and Lakeside sites would cause great inconvenience to residents who have to haul their trash at least an additional 10 miles, Barb Miller said.

The Somers site, she said, “is a fatality waiting to happen.”

“This study shows a complete disregard” for the added public inconvenience of having to haul their trash farther, she said. “We want the views of the local populations heard.”

Bigfork resident Faith Brynie voiced her opinion against closing the Bigfork site — and the fact that public input has not been used in the initial consolidation plan.

“I hope we don’t lose sight that the goal is to meet the needs of the people of Flathead County,” Brynie said. Brynie brought printed sheets of paper with 778 signatures of people against closure of the Bigfork site.

“This is a system that’s worked for two generations,” she said. “If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.”

One man in the audience was less tactful.

“The fluff of the wording … makes me want to puke,” Marion resident Bud Slayer said. “You’re not listening,” he said, angrily. “We’re supposed to be the boss and you are the public servants.

“You’re trash czars.”

Slayer then told Flathead County commissioner Gary Krueger that if the consolidation plan is approved, “I will do everything in my power to make sure you do not get back in” to office.

“These are just a bunch of ideas of how to not serve the community better. You ought to know how the people feel.”

Krueger is the only county commissioner who is on the solid waste board. The rest of the board is appointed by the commissioners.

Krueger had advocated recently that if Bigfork residents want their own trash-collection site, they should pay for it by creating a tax district.

Sue Hansen said cost should not be a factor in the county wanting to consolidate its trash sites. “The sheriff’s office doesn’t charge us extra to come to Bigfork,” she said. “The discussion of cost is what bothers me the most.”

The plan has two goals: to study the service capacity of each of the 11 trash sites in the county, and to provide the solid waste board with options of what to do with the site before the capacity is reached.

Daniel Dietch of CH2M said public input was not generated prior to the county devising this consolidation plan. “Now we want to make sure the study is reflective of the community,” he said. He noted that the process is about “compromise. Everybody is going to get something … but no one is going to get everything.”

Paul Mutascio, president of the Community Foundation for a Better Bigfork, has advocated that cost should not be the only factor the county uses in determining its trash-collection services. Mutascio told the meeting that the county’s study looked at trash collection as an industrial waste stream to be managed as a cost — not as a public service.

“There is no fiscal reason I can see,” he said. “If we are going to make such a major change, it needs to be well thought out. The analysis has to be relevant.”

Money — on the revenue side — was one factor that a local resident cited in her opposition to closing any trash sites. “Sue” from Somers said she is “Dumpster diver” who makes her living off of collecting refuse at the garbage sites.

She said people who use the sites could be more mindful of their personal trash. This would reduce the amount of trash at the sites. “People have gotten very lazy, and not wanting to drive to the places that are available” to take their unused household items, she said.

She sells the items in rummage sales and also makes art out of the trash. “I am passionate about our rights to do that,” she said.