SWAG agenda 110316 - Laserfiche WebLink

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Orange County, NC Financial Plan & Rate Study for Solid Waste Enterprise Fund 4.2 MODIFICATION OF ORGANICS COLLECTION PROGRAM FUNDING STRUCTURE Commercial curbside collection and residential drop -off collection of food and other organic wastes currently cost the Department $80 per ton per its contract with Brooks Contracting. The Department could encourage residents to compost at home to reduce expenditure by the Department and keep the waste closer to its point of origin for direct reuse. The Brooks composting facility is located an hour southeast of the Town of Chapel Hill, approximately 36 miles away. Significant cost is incurred by the contractor to haul the material to the windrow composting site from the point of collection, and then back to the Orange County Landfill so the finished compost can be solid to residents. Efficiencies are to be gained by changing the approach to the commercial collection efforts and bolstering the home composting program already in place. Additionally, the program funding structure could be changed to implement cost sharing by the largest utilizers of the commercial organics collections program, which could bear some or all of its costs. This would shift the burden of paying for the program from the Programs Fee or general fund to the entities that benefit most from the program. County businesses utilizing the program could pay a flat monthly fee or, alternatively, pay according to the quantity of organics disposed through the program. 4.3 MAJOR WEATHER EVENT /STORM DEBRIS HANDLING Currently the Department handles staging, clearing, and disposal operations for the cleanup of storm debris from major weather events such as tornados, hurricanes, ice storms, and major thunderstorms. Funding for these efforts is not provided via emergency allocations from the General Fund, and the Department generally absorbs the costs. Financial resources should be allocated for these non - routine events so that the cost burden is not transferred to the Department. Additional monies may be allocated into a hypothetical renewal and extension (R &E) fund to cover costs associated with unexpected weather or natural disaster events. 4.4 REGULATED RECYCLABLE MATERIALS ORDINANCE The institution of the Regulated Recyclable Materials Ordinance (RRMO) in October 2002 may have had the unintended side effect of reducing the tonnage of material disposed at the C &D Landfill (without directing this material for recycling). It is possible that the sorting and permitting requirements of the RRMO coupled with the timing of the global economic recession may have caused a decrease in tonnages that has not rebounded as of FY 2015 -16 as shown in Exhibit 18. Although the RRMO does produce additional revenue from contractor licensing fees, the tipping fee revenue and economies of scale lost from the decline in the tonnage of C &D waste disposed (from roughly 30,000 TPY to 6,000 TPY, an 80% decline that equals approximately $960K in lost revenue at the current tipping fee of $40 /ton) outweighs the licensing fee revenue of $120K considerably. 26