Audit: Mahoning Co. recycling is improving

Personnel costs here dropped from $7.83 to $2.78 per recycled ton in one year.

By PETER H. MILLIKEN

VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER

YOUNGSTOWN — A state performance audit shows the Mahoning County Recycling Division has substantially improved its recycling rates and cost efficiency, but the division will strive to do even better, the division’s director says.

“We have vastly increased recycling amounts and reduced costs,” said Jim Petuch, director of the recycling division, known as the Green Team, since March 31, 2005.

The Green Team’s mission is to promote efficient solid waste (garbage and recyclables) management, increase recycling and reduce reliance on landfills.

The percentage of the county’s total residential and commercial waste stream being recycled rose from 9.76 percent in 2004 to 14.78 percent in 2005 and 22.71 percent in 2006, Petuch noted.

The state mandate is 25 percent, said Anthony Traficanti, chairman of the county commissioners and of the county’s solid waste policy committee.

Although the audit shows Mahoning County’s personnel costs per ton of recycled waste still exceed those of other counties, Petuch cited audit findings that the Mahoning County Green Team reduced those costs from $7.83 in 2005 to $2.78 last year. “We’re going to keep bringing that down, I guarantee you,” Petuch said.

The audit compared Mahoning County’s figures with 2005 figures of $1.85 per ton in Clark County and $1.39 per ton in Summit County.

Petuch noted Green Team personnel costs have dropped 19 percent between 2004 and 2007. The audit reports the Green Team has nine full-time and three part-time employees and says the team shouldn’t increase staff unless recycling rates improve.

“We’ve cut staff at the Green Team. They used to have 18 or 19 people,” Traficanti said.

Late last year, county commissioners engaged the state auditor’s office for the performance audit, which was conducted this year and cost the Green Team $40,000. County Administrator George Tablack sought the audit, saying it would highlight the best practices of comparable recycling agencies.

“We felt we would like to see just how our solid-waste district functions and where we may be weak and where we may be strong,” Traficanti said.

A key recommendation of the audit is better oversight of Mahoning County’s three landfills, including installation of video surveillance cameras at their scales, which weigh incoming trucks and the waste to be dumped there.

The landfills are the Carbon-Limestone Landfill in Poland Township, the Mahoning Landfill in Springfield Township, and the Central Waste Landfill in Smith Township. All are privately owned and all accept municipal garbage, construction and demolition debris and nontoxic industrial waste.

The auditors recommended that the Green Team negotiate with landfill operators to have Green Team staff monitor the scales.

Petuch, however, cited an opinion from Tim Tusek, assistant county prosecutor, that the Green Team lacks the legal authority to inspect the landfills.

Although the Green Team lacks that legal authority, it provided $455,624 annually to the Mahoning County Health Department in 2005 and 2006 to monitor the landfills, which the health department has the legal authority to inspect, Petuch said.

This year, the county health department, which performs sanitary and environmental inspections at the landfills, added scale weight monitoring to its duties at his insistence, Petuch said. Petuch added that he has advocated since 2005 that the health department perform the scale checks.

Also this year, deputy sheriffs began stopping and checking landfill-bound trucks on nearby roads, he said.

A major goal of the deputies’ efforts and the health department’s monitoring is to ensure that haulers accurately declare the origin of the waste so the Green Team receives its proper revenue, and so landfill dumping and recycling rates for waste originating in Mahoning County can be accurately reported, Petuch explained.

The landfills pay the Green Team disposal fees of $1.50 per ton for waste generated either in Mahoning County or out of state, but $3 a ton for Ohio waste generated outside Mahoning County but dumped here, Petuch noted. Federal law prohibits fees for out-of-state waste from exceeding the in-county fee, Petuch said. Landfill disposal fees generate almost all of the Green Team’s $3 million in annual revenue.

Landfill monitoring is important to assure accurate weight and waste origin reporting and to make sure only legally acceptable waste is dumped, Traficanti said. “We have more enforcement now at the scale houses,” he said. “We don’t want our district to be cheated, and, if we catch anybody lying, we’re going to prosecute them.”

The audit notes that the Green Team spends substantially more for health department landfill monitoring than the $149,108 annual average for comparison counties (Clark, Lake and Summit).

It also notes that the Green Team provided $250,000 in 2005 and $415,000 in 2006 to its county engineering department for maintenance of roads near landfills, which are damaged by hundreds of landfill-bound trucks daily, whereas other counties’ recycling agencies spend nothing for such road repairs.

The auditors note that state law permits county recycling agencies to spend money on landfill-related services from their county health and engineering departments.

“We are very generous with the health department and very generous with the engineers, and they’re both essential,” Petuch said. “We have about 1 million tons of out-of-state waste coming in here every year,” Petuch said. Other counties mentioned in the audit don’t have that much volume coming to their landfills, he added.

On another matter, Petuch said he wants to increase household participation in voluntary pay-as-you-throw garbage collection programs here above the 1 percent level noted in the audit.

Under such programs, customers are charged based on the number of cans or bags of garbage they throw out. Such programs provide customers a financial incentive to recycle and compost their waste because the more garbage they generate, the more they pay for garbage collection.

The auditors observed that Mahoning County is the only one among the comparison group that collects and composts leaves, and they quoted an Ohio EPA representative, who said that program will help the county improve its overall recycling rate by keeping yard waste out of landfills.

“It was a fair and balanced assessment of us,” Petuch said of the audit. “Sure, we have a ways to go.”