County Commissioner's Office

County Talk
By
Lamar Paris - Commissioner

Q. Do you stand by your statements last week regarding the Fire and Rescue Department?
A. Absolutely!!! The county has put significant amounts of taxpayer resources into the Fire and Rescue (EMA-Emergency Management Agency) Department.  We have so many well trained and dedicated employees and volunteers who do such an excellent job.  It was our very own Fire Chief and Director of EMA operations who headed up the Union County search for Meredith Emerson.  He and the entire staff and volunteers have received many accolades from agencies all over the state for the professional handling and coordination of the search.  In a large part, the Union County efforts by the Fire Department/EMA and the Sheriff’s Department led to the eventual capture of Gary Michael Hilton.

Q. Isn’t restructuring and improving the transfer station one of your SPLOST projects?
A.  Yes, it is one of the projects that the public voted on.

Q.  Why do we not have manned garbage collection sites throughout the county?
A. The answer is simple, MONEY and tax increases.  Two years ago I approached our contractor, Appalachian Waste Systems, to ask about the cost of placing only TWO garbage collection convenience centers out in the county (not six), one on the north side of the county and one on the south side.  When he let me know that we would have to raise the garbage collection fee from $49/ton to $58/ton, it just did not make sense at the time, and especially not now in a tight economy.  At some point in the future as we continue to grow, we will need to revisit this issue.

Q.  What would be the cost to have six, manned garbage collection sites for the public to bring their bagged garbage and recyclables to?
A.   These numbers are easy to come up with as there are two counties of similar size that currently do this.  One has a property tax rate nearly double what ours is at nearly 9.5 mils..  The cost per year to supply employees and run the transfer station and six garbage collection centers for one county is $912,000 per year.  That consists of $360,000 to operate the sites with employees, and an additional $552,000 to haul and landfill the waste.

The other county has a solid waste annual budget of $1,572,677, with an employee cost of  $460,705.  The contractor haul fee is $674,000, with the balance being other operational costs, including gas, water, electricity bills, and building maintenance.

Both of these counties are similar in size to Union County, with one slightly larger and one slightly smaller.

So either the taxpayers will have to pay for this in fees, or through increased property taxes.  Taking the smaller figure of $912,000 would require that we increase our property taxes 13.27%, or raise our property tax from 5.05 mills to 5.763 mills.

Q. Does the $912,000 annual cost of operation include the capital budget required to equip these sites?
A.  NO!  The estimate to purchase the land, and to put the sites into operation with the required hazardous liquid collection systems is over $750,000 for the six sites (includes grading site, gravel, paving, building, fencing, garbage compactor, restrooms, water, sewer and power).

Q. Where would that money come from?
A. The taxpayers--in increased property taxes.  There is nowhere else to get the money.   

Q.  Where would you put six garbage collection sites in the county?
A.  I would not want the job of finding the six sites in our county.  Do you want to volunteer to put one of the six sites near your home?

Q. I pay to have my garbage hauled now, so would it be fair for me to have to pay additional property taxes for more garbage collection centers?
A. That is a good point to argue and certainly has merit.  The other issue is how much business would all of our private garbage haulers lose because of six new garbage collection sites?  It would probably be significant and possibly put several of them out of business. Do we want to take a service that is currently being handled by private enterprise and convert it to a government run operation, and add eleven additional county employees (7% of our work force)?  Not me.

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