County and city leaders will be meeting in a workshop Thursday night in an effort to reach an agreement on whether or not the county should pay the city for the treatment of landfill leachate at the wastewater treatment plant. The meeting is set for 6:00 p.m. at the Smithville City Hall building.
County Mayor Mike Foster and members of the county commission’s solid waste committee will meet with Smithville Mayor Taft Hendrixson and city aldermen to discuss the issue.
As WJLE reported last week, the City of Smithville, since August 2008, has not been paying the county for the disposal of city garbage in the landfill and the county, since March 2009, has not been paying for the treatment of landfill leachate being hauled to the city’s waste water treatment plant.
County Mayor Foster told WJLE last week that this non-payment agreement was worked out between he and Smithville Mayor Taft Hendrixson months ago. But according to Mayor Hendrixson, there was no such deal. He said the city’s refusal to pay is based on the principle that the county should not be charging Smithville a fee to dump city garbage in the county landfill since city residents are already supporting the operation of the landfill as county taxpayers. That, he said, is double taxation.
Whatever the arrangement has been between the city and county, Smithville Alderman Shawn Jacobs, during last week’s city council meeting, asked that city officials revisit the issue with County Mayor Foster in a workshop.
Foster made the announcement of the workshop during Monday night’s county commission meeting. “We’ve kinda had a deal with them for the last couple of years. We were getting a lot of storm water with the new (landfill) cell. There was some discussion about whether or not they (city) should pay for taking their garbage to the landfill. For the last two years we’ve not been charging them and they’ve not been charging us for storm water but we need to revisit that. I had sent (the city) a resolution to extend that agreement between the city and the DeKalb County landfill. I had sent it sometime in August but everybody has just been busy. We just need to sit down and agree to whether we charge each other or we don’t charge each other and discuss how we’re going to do that and rather than operate under a verbal understanding, we need a written agreement either way,” said Foster
In July, Foster told WJLE that the county’s solid waste fund no longer receives any county property tax money. The fund is supported by revenues derived from payment-in-lieu of taxes, local option sales taxes, hotel-motel tax, bank excise tax, and the wholesale beer tax, etc. Up until two years ago, the solid waste fund was supported by a portion of the property tax rate. Since then, the tax rate previously designated for solid waste, 20 cents, has been added to the general fund.
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