Bannock County trash bills could see hike

Bannock County residents could soon be shelling-out an extra $10 each year on their trash bill – but it’s the county itself facing the sticker shock.

On Tuesday morning, the Bannock County Landfill officials asked the commissioners how to handle the increasingly expensive trash problem the landfill has been facing for the past six years.

“It’s not the old county dump it used to be,” Bannock County Commissioner Ken Bullock said. “This is a full-blown environmental impact and it’s costing money.”

Bullock said the problem started in 2011 when county officials at that time decreased the amount residents were paying by roughly three dollars, which caused the county to lose millions of dollars in revenue.

Now, the new commissioners are trying to figure out how to make-up this deficit. Part of the solution – raising the rates back up to what they approximately were before the 2011 decrease.

“We’re adjusting those rates and looking at everything we could do to keep that at a minimum. But, to be honest, we’re going to have to raise those rates to keep everything above board and make it so that the landfill is paying for itself,” Bullock added.

The proposal is to raise each household’s rates by roughly $0.80 to $0.90 each month.

Bannock County Landfill Superintendent Therese Marchetti calculated, for every one-dollar per ton they take-in, this will translate to an extra $100,000 per year. In all, this will be an extra $400,000 in revenue the county will be able to generate to help pay for the landfill. But the county worries this might be just a drop in the bucket when you’re looking at the looming costs to operate the landfill.

The second part of the problem is the rapidly increasing amount of trash the landfill is swallowing-up.

Bullock said, as the trash piles-up, so do the extra costs on the county.

“There’s the cost of equipment, the cost of manpower, the cost of environmental quality – it’s all going up,” he said.