The Money Issue

The SCRD wants to close Pender Harbour’s long-serving landfill and truck Area A’s 2,000 tonnes of waste to the Sechelt landfill. They claim this will save money. How can it possibly be cheaper to landfill garbage 40 km away than to landfill it where it starts out? Here is how the SCRD makes its case. According to the SCRD consultant, Sperling Hansen Associates (SHA), the Pender landfill cost $256,838 to operate in 2007. (SHA 2.5.4) However most of this cost would continue even if the landfill were closed. The only expense that would be saved would be that of the landfilling contract and cover material, which comes to $100,410. But this would not be entirely saved, because with the landfill closed, new costs would be added for trucking the garbage to Sechelt and landfilling it there. According to SCRD estimates, trucking would cost $500 a load and there would be 60 loads a year, coming to $30,000. This still leaves landfilling, and if landfilling cost the same in Sechelt as in Pender, obviously there would be no saving. However, the SCRD estimates landfilling at Sechelt would only cost half what it does in Pender, or $49,560. This brings the combination of trucking and landfilling in Sechelt to only $79,560, or $20,440 cheaper than landfilling in Pender. This is the annual saving in operating costs upon which the SCRD bases its case for closure.

Before going any further, let`s stop and consider what an insignificant amount this $20,000 is in the big picture. Between 2005 and 2009, the SCRD increased its solid waste taxes in Area A from $43,000 to $171,000, a boost of 380% that would provide enough to keep the landfill going six times over. But none of this tax money is used for the landfill. It used to be, but due to a change in policy the SCRD now directs tax money toward things like beach cleanup, public education and outreach. No doubt, the SCRD’s aggressive campaign to persuade us to close the landfill has used up a goodly portion of this newly-created education and outreach fund! Twenty-thousand is less than the $43,800 in administration charges the SCRD billed to the landfill in 2007. Just think of that--they pay themselves $43,800 for shuffling the paper then close the whole operation down for the want of $20,000! The $20,000 the SCRD says it can't afford even to satisfy 83% of Area A residents is microscopic compared to the $8 million-plus the SCRD plans to spend to fix some of the problems recently revealed at the Sechelt landfill, or the $12 million it plans to spend reducing methane emissions at Sechelt. The Sechelt landfill is costing a lot of money to keep in order, and it is filling up much more rapidly than previously estimated. It is now expected to last only about 18-24 years. Closing Pender will shorten its life by an estimated 2-3 years. Amazingly, the SCRD has never attempted to attach a cost to losing 2-3 years operating life at its very pricey Sechelt landfill. Just the upgrades mentioned above (which are only a portion of its total cost) work out to $1 million for every year left in its life. Removing 2-3 of those years is thus worth at least 2-3 million. That makes $20,000 look pretty small.

The SCRD would argue that closing the landfill would save $60,000 a year rather than $20,000, because for every year a landfill operates in BC it must set aside a sum of money to pay for the cost of sealing off the site when it reaches the end of its life. At Pender this closure cost has been approximately $40,000 annually, and that amount appears in SCRD estimates of the annual cost of the Pender landfill. However, when it comes to landfilling Pender garbage in Sechelt, no closure cost for the Sechelt is included. But it should be, if we are comparing apples to apples. Area A garbage would make up 10-15% of the total waste handled at Sechelt, so 10-15% of the annual closure cost should be assigned to the annual cost of the Area A transfer station. Given the new $8 million closure system ordered for the Sechelt site, this would more than offset the $40,000 in annual Area A closure costs. It might offset the $20,000 in extra operating costs as well but the final figures are still pending while SCRD staff adds up the multi-million-dollar upgrades required to bring the Sechelt landfill into compliance with its new operating certificate.

If that doesn't remove the purported $20,000 cost advantage of the transfer station option, there are other factors that would. The Sterling Hansen report underestimates the cost of trucking Area A's 2,000 tonnes of raw garbage to Sechelt. This is not surprising because they didn't exactly exert themselves researching the matter. They only asked one trucker, and he offered the round figure of $500 a trip. No wonder they ended their report by saying "external information has not been verified...to determine its accuracy or completeness." Okay, $500 may not be far off until the fuel surcharges come back, but how many trips will be required? The consultants asked the people who run the landfill and found that Area A fills 1 40-yd. container every day in winter and 2 in summer. This would mean a 3-container trip every 3 days for 10 months and every 1.5 days for 2 months, totalling 140 trips. Cost: $70,000. Combined with the $50,000 assigned to landfilling costs in Sechelt, this comes to $120,000, or $20,000 more (not less) than the landfill option. Oops! To get this down, the consultants propose bringing in compactors to increase the density of the garbage in the bins from .1 tonne per cubic metre to .4 tonnes per cubic metre. This gets the number of trips down to 50 per year for a cost of $30,000. Load weight goes up to 40 tonnes, which the SCRD assumes that the trucking company will be happy to transport for the same price as uncompacted loads weighing only 15 tonnes--certainly a dubious assumption. More than doubling the load weight could easily add 60% to the haul cost, which would erase the supposed $20,000 saving over landfilling at Pender.