By way of explanation, Charles City County is one of the original shires established in Virginia in 1634 and, when they took the last census in 1990, we had approximately 400 people more than when they took the first census in 1790. We are located between Richmond and Williamsburg on the James River, have almost no industry, no cities or towns and no stop lights. We are essentially one of the poorest, if not the poorest, county in eastern Virginia.
In 1987, the state of Virginia mandated that we close our local landfill, which was typical of most landfills at that time, that is it was an unlined hole in the ground without any monitoring wells.
Although the state mandated that we close this facility and replace it with something else, no funds were made available to us. At the time, our tax rate was $1.29 per hundred, which was the highest tax rate of any rural county in the state. Even with this high tax rate, our school system was physically deteriorated and we had no hope of any significant improvements. The cheapest recognized alternative for handling our solid waste at that time would have required a real estate tax increase of at least 50~.1
None of these alternatives were acceptable to us and we proposed a public-private partnership whereby a private company would operate a regional landfill owned by the County, would do so under extremely strict environmental safeguards and would still pay significant revenues to the County. After many public hearings, the citizens of Charles City supported this approach and a landfill operator was selected. That led to the construction of the Charles City regional landfill that now serves not only eastern Virginia, but cities along the east coast. we recognized from the beginning, that if the landfill design was going to be as stringent as we required to assure the safety of our citizens, there would have to be a substantial amount of trash brought to the landfill from outside of the County. We did not discriminate at that time between trash from the City of Richmond or northern Virginia and the trash of Newark or New York. The cost of building an acre of landfill to our specifications, which is twice the standard required by the state of Virginia and the Environmental Protection Agency, is approximately $300,000.00 and we were willing to trade off the handling of other people's trash in return for having such a safe facility.2
\1\ We considered building a new lined landfill by ourself, joining another county to build a joint lined landfill, building a transfer station and then transporting the garbage to another landfill or simply paying a landfill operator to collect the County's waste at various locations and to dispose of it.
In addition to providing Charles City with an environmentally safe landfill, our agreement has provided the County with a dramatic source of revenue. Since the landfill began operation in 1990, we have collected approximately 40 Million Dollars in payments. These funds have allowed the County to reduce its tax burden for its citizens (it is currently $0.72 per hundred), to replace completely its failing school facilities, to expand its recreational program for its citizens and to provide new office facilities for both County government and the County School Board.
Because the regional landfill was such an unqualified success for Charles City, a number of other Virginia counties have allowed regional landfills to be placed in them. These counties are typically rural with low tax base. As a result, Virginia now has seven (7) regional landfills. We recognize the public pressure and concern that revolves around the handling of trash, but this committee should recognize that the drive to limit out of state trash has nothing to do with the environment and every thing to do with politics. A review of the actions of our Governor and our legislature during the most recent session of the General Assembly that ended in February proves this point. While the Governor and legislature bent over backwards to discriminate against out of state waste, there was also a bill which would have required the closure of unlined landfills that have been demonstrated to be leaking and posing a threat to the environment of Virginia. This bill received no support from the Governor and was defeated by the legislature. So Virginia is left with officially sanctioned leaking landfills while we are concerned today with the quality of New York trash versus Richmond trash and what state is number 1, 2 or 3 in terms of handling out of state trash. I should also point out that there is a certain amount of hypocrisy in Virginia's position, since all of our hazardous waste is disposed of outside Virginia, primarily in Ohio and New York, and our nuclear waste is also disposed of out of state.
\2\ Both EPA and Virginia design requirements specify that new landfills must have a liner system with a leachate collection system above the liner to preclude leachate escaping from the landfill and getting into the ground water. The Charles City license agreement requires that our operator construct landfill cells with two (2) liner systems and two (2) leachate collection systems and that they fund a separate account of approximately $300,000.00 per year to allow the County to hire independent engineers to monitor both the construction and operation of the landfill on a weekly or daily basis as necessary. The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality has its own inspector view the landfill on a quarterly basis.
Interstate commerce works and the extent to which it is restricted will have real impacts on real people. The consequences of such a restriction will be to increase arbitrarily fees for many generators of solid waste and, at the same time, penalize counties who attempted to meet the requirements of the state and EPA with environmentally safe landfill facilities.