Dale commission talks landfill sale

The Dale County Landfill may be up for sale after the Dale County Commission approved initiating the process at the meeting Jan. 25.

The landfill, located at Bivins Drive, off of County Road 30 five miles south of Ozark has been “mothballed” since 2015 after commissioners heard a report from a consultant who outlined options for closing the Dale County Construction and Demolition Landfill. 

Dale County Engineer Derek Brewer told the commission that even in a “mothballed” status, the landfill costs the county some $97,000 annually to maintain. The cost would be double that if the landfill were reopened.

Dale County Commissioner Charles “Chic” Gary said that should the landfill be put up for sale, he would only consider purchase offers of the entire landfill. “If some entity wants to come in here and buy it, it’s either all or nothing,” Gary said. “It’s not pick and choose.”

In 2015 the commission had retained a consultant in hopes of eliminating the financial losses incurred by the county in operating the landfill. At that time, they expressed interest in the option that called for cutting the landfill’s hours of operation to a minimal level.  “You don’t get out of the landfill business, but you restrict the hours of operation,” the consultant had advised them at a February 2015 commission meeting. “You restrict operating hours so 98 percent of the time there’s nobody at the site, the gates are closed and you don’t have to have equipment there for anything except to respond to an emergency. You eliminate a lot of your expenses.”

Currently, to maintain “mothballed” status, the landfill is opened to the public four times a year. 

The landfill was most recently on the commission agenda in August 2021 when Ozark Mayor Mark Blankenship asked the commission to consider reopening the county landfill Mondays through Thursdays. “We’re seeing more and more construction in Ozark and in the Oct. 1 budget, we’ve increased our demolition budget in the city from $20,000 to $100,000,” he said. “The problem the city of Ozark is having is we have so far to commute going to Rose Hill.

“I feel a little awkward making this presentation because I was the one to make the presentation asking y’all to close the landfill,” said Blankenship, who had been the Dale County Commission Chairman at the time the county landfill was mothballed.

“When (the commission) closed it we were losing $39,039 a year on an average of four years. The economy was bad. There wasn’t a lot of activity and that’s one of the reasons we made the recommendation but at that same time we said we would revisit the landfill operation and that’s the reason we mothballed it instead of closing it down all together,” Blankenship said. “We feel like the economy has turned around to the point that we need to relook at that.”

Besides the county owned “mothballed” landfill, the only other landfill in Dale County is the Rose Hill Landfill in Midland City which was owned by Gary until February 2021 when he sold it to Mark Dunning Industries.

 “I don’t think we can survive opening it back up unless we go across the creek over there spending an enormous amount of money to bring that into operation. I just don’t see it,” Gary told Blankenship at that August meeting.

“I don’t remember space being an issue when we closed it—it was financial,” Blankenship had replied. “I still have the presentation that we made and we had no discussion about running out of room at that time.”

Gary asked Brewer his opinion about reopening the county landfill. “What this body has to decide is whether you want to offer landfill service to the public,” he said. “If you decide you want to do it, we’ll find a way to make it happen but you’re talking about $200,000 to run that landfill.”

Blankenship said Henry County operates their landfill with 1,080 tons a year and Geneva County operates theirs with 2,000 tons a year. “I think the residents of Dale County deserve to have a landfill back open,” he said.

McKinnon suggested that he and Brewer research the exact cost of reopening the landfill and the exact amount of available space there and report back to the commission. At the next meeting, the commissioners voted not to reopen the landfill.

The next meeting of the Dale County Commission is Feb. 8 at the Dale County Government Building in Ozark. A work session begins at 9 a.m. and is followed by a voting meeting. Both meetings are open to the public.