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Drop-off recycling site leases total $268,800 annually
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Rich Jones of Poland deposits plastic items at Poland Township’s recycling site, 7474 Clingan Road.
Second of a two-part series
YOUNGSTOWN
The Mahoning County Recycling Division is paying $268,800 a year to lease drop-off recycling sites from 19 townships and municipalities, a community baseball association and a state park, but five other entities make their sites available free of charge.
Lou Vega, director of the division, which also is known as the Green Team, said he’d like to reduce the lease expenses for next year.
That’s because the division is faced with a budget crunch because of declining landfill dumping fee revenues due to reduced landfill use and because of the closing of a Smith Township landfill last year.
The division expects to collect $2.3 million in revenues and spend $2.9 million this year, exhausting its $600,000 carryover to cover the difference, he said.
The leases, ranging from $3,000 to $42,000 each, vary according to the services each community provides, recycling volumes and the number of sites each community must manage.
The division began leasing these sites a decade ago “to establish a uniformity in the site location, service and aesthetics” and in bin and site design, said Jim Jerek, recycling division business manager.
“Generally, they are one-year, with options to renew,” Vega said of the leases.
Most of the communities use the lease money to pay a recycling coordinator to keep the sites clean, make sure the proper materials go into the bins, promote recycling and alert the division when the bins are full and need to be emptied, Vega said.
The sites accept plastics, paper publications, corrugated cardboard, beverage cans and glass bottles and jars.
The county’s $30,000 lease with Poland Township covers just one recycling site, the one at 7474 Clingan Road, adjacent to the township road department, which is the county’s second-busiest recycling drop-off site.
Last year, the Poland site collected 829,940 pounds of recyclables. Austintown’s Raccoon Road site was first with 1,097,120 pounds.
“It’s always clean,” Jim Scharville, Poland township administrator, said of the Poland site. “Our people out here are terrific. They recycle,” he added.
The site also is used by Pennsylvanians, as shown by the license plates on some cars using the site, said Scharville, who is the township’s recycling coordinator.
“Our people were recycling so much, I had to get more bins out there,” Scharville said.
The lease money pays part of Scharville’s salary, and it supplements the salaries of part-time summer road department workers, who keep the site clean, and the salary of a regular road department employee, who keeps the site clean during the rest of the year.
Cutting the township’s lease would be ironic because the Carbon-Limestone Landfill in the township is the source of most of the county recycling division’s dumping fee revenue, and it was Poland Township trustees who negotiated for Allied Waste Services, which operates the landfill, to provide free curbside recycling to 90,000 Mahoning County homes, Scharville said.
If the lease is cut, the fate of the Clingan Road site would be up to the township trustees, Scharville said. However, he said of the county recycling division: “What’s the incentive to have a large site like that if they’re not at least subsidizing it?”
If the leases are reduced, Vega hopes to keep the sites clean by using free labor from day-reporting county sheriff’s department inmates on weekdays and weekends.
Vega said he is trying to negotiate reductions in lease costs with the townships and municipalities for next year.
The leases, paid for by landfill dumping fees, do not include costs of pouring the concrete pads on which the bins rest and hauling, emptying and replacing the bins.
Five drop-off sites already are used rent-free by the recycling division: Sam’s Club and the Mahoning County Board of Developmental Disabilities workshop on Marwood Circle, both in Boardman; the Mill Creek MetroParks Farm in Canfield; and the Boys and Girls Club and Four Seasons Flea Market, both in Youngstown.