A puzzling petition
Text 
No Comments [ Add Comment ]I
t's not often you see taxpayers opposing a plan that will save them money, but that's the curiosity of a Box Elder County petition drive.
Nine people, including former state lawmaker Eli Anderson, have signed and submitted an application for a referendum on the sale of the county's landfill at Little Mountain to a consortium of five Top of Utah counties: Cache, Davis/Morgan, Weber and, of course, Box Elder, which are equal partners in the Northern Utah Regional Landfill Association.
The sale of the landfill to NURLA was approved Dec. 18 by a 2-1 vote of the Box Elder County Commission. The reason: After at least a year's worth of study and analysis, the five counties determined they could reduce the cost -- by as much as 50 percent or more -- of landfilling their refuse if they found a common site and leveraged the economies of scale involving 600,000 tons of garbage a year for 80 years.
The backers of an alternate landfill site on Promontory Point said they disagreed with the decision to use Little Mountain. Well, of course they would; they stood to make a lot of money had NURLA decided to haul its trash there.
The Promontory site, among other things, is dependent on millions of dollars to improve the currently unimproved road across the Union Pacific railroad causeway spanning part of the Great Salt Lake; Little Mountain is not. Besides, Cache County made it known it wouldn't participate in NURLA if Promontory was chosen, due to the increased distance from Cache to Promontory -- and if Cache isn't a partner in NURLA, that raises every other partner's prices.
The thing we can't quite understand is this: What's the motivation of the petitioners? They can point to no corruption in NURLA's process used to select Little Mountain as the preferred site. They can't plausibly make the accusation that it will cost Box Elder taxpayers any more money, because it will be a savings to Box Elder taxpayers: NURLA has agreed to purchase the county's landfill, and the county will receive an extra $1.50 per ton of trash buried there in "host" fees -- that's an extra $900,000 per year, based on the expected 600,000 tons of garbage annually. Furthermore, the petitioners can't say they don't like the idea of a landfill being at Little Mountain, since the landfill's already there, and it has, in recent years, even accepted as much as 200,000 tons of garbage from outside Box Elder County.
Instead, would-be petitioners have said they think the process was too hurried, even though it has been ongoing for more than a year. (We first wrote about it in this space Dec. 24, 2006.) Anderson, the petition's primary proponent, told our reporter Marshall Thompson, "This was the only option available to help people get informed on the matter."
Well, what about reading the newspaper, people? And attending public meetings?
Maybe the petitioners have some information that will throw new light on NURLA's choice of Little Mountain, or the sale of Little Mountain to NURLA. If so, fine: present the evidence.
Otherwise, Box Elder voters should scuttle the petition and start warming up to the idea of saving money on the disposal of their trash.
Add Your Comment
