In a report delivered to the Orange County Solid Waste Advisory Board (SWAB) Tuesday night, Charlotte-based consultants Olver, Inc. said that building and operating a waste transfer station would be cheaper than paying a private company to haul the county's trash to a landfill in another county. (The county's municipal solid waste landfill is set to close in 2011.) As mentioned here previously, Olver is projecting the station will cost $55 million over the course of 20 years--roughly $7 to $9 million less than paying private vendors to haul trash over the same time period. The projected cost for a transfer station includes a $4.8 million budget for land purchase, planning and construction-- a lower figure than originally mentioned. Olver, which specializes in developing waste facilities, spread these costs out over 20 years, and then compared overall annual figures to private-vendor options.
The results--which showed lower costs for a transfer station, compared to private-vendor options, for each of the next 20 years (with the exception of one year in which hauling waste to Durham's municipal transfer station would be cheaper)--were puzzling to Orange County Commissioner Steve Yuhasz, who sat in on the meeting. (View the summary, and background materials.)
"I'm not sure that graph answers my question," he said to Olver representative James Reynolds, referring to the Board of County Commissioners' original request to analyze a "parallel track" of, among other options, temporarily using private vendors. "That's factoring in, I think, the cost of building the transfer station. What I'm saying is, if we don't build the transfer stationit seems to me that those two lines cross further out."
One reason the transfer-station costs remained relatively low was Olver's estimate for the price of building the facility--a source of speculation for months. Olver achieved the figure of $4.8 million, in part, by recommending the county purchase just 25 acres, at $15,000 an acre, for a total of $375,000 in land purchase costs. However, that estimate is at odds with the proposed sites' property owners. In a letter to the county, Dennis Howell insisted on selling all 143 acres of one site, for no less than $3 million. The Orange Water and Sewer Authority (OWASA), which owns the second site, has made clear it does not wish to sell.
Bonnie Hauser, a member of Orange County Voice, an advocacy group opposed to the proposed sites, challenged Reynolds on his cost estimates: "So if we wrote a check for a $5 million fixed price, we would be good?" she said.
"Would I guarantee it? No," Reynolds said.
Other numbers raised eyebrows, including the distance Olver calculated from the transfer-station sites to the average Chapel Hill collection point (8 miles), shorter than its projected distance to Carrboro (8.7 miles). In fact, the proposed sites, which are along N.C. Hwy 54 in southwestern Orange County, are 8 miles west of Carrboro, and 11 miles west of Chapel Hill (see map below):