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FAIRFIELD – With the clock ticking on a pair of controversial bills in the General Assembly designed to prevent counties from owning a monopoly on waste disposal (House bill H.3290 and its Senate companion, S.203), to which many S.C. counties, including Fairfield, are opposed, an attorney with the S.C. Association of Counties (SCAC) delivered an update on the legislation to County Council during their May 13 meeting.

“This bill went through the House like a hot knife through butter, with virtually no discussion,” Robert Croom told Council last week. “On the Senate side, they tend to slow things down a little bit and with any luck this will be slowed down for the rest of the year.”

Croom said the House version of the bill now sits on the Senate’s contested calendar, and unless some special procedural actions are taken, it is not likely to reach the floor for a vote before the session ends. But it could happen, he said, and if it passes, counties who have invested bond money into landfills will be left in the lurch. Unable to compete with private industry to dispose of waste, Croom said that taxpayers will ultimately have to pick up the tab to pay for those landfills. If not, he said, and counties default on those bonds, the bond market will no longer lend the public money to build landfills.

“We’ll end up with a lot of larger landfills,” he said.

Even worse, Croom said, was a one-word change in the bill, from “industrial” waste to “solid” waste.

“That one-word change in Section 2, it guts the decision DHEC (the Department of Health and Environmental Control) makes on permits,” Croom said. “Your county’s solid waste plan would no longer be able to address large chunks of that waste, and they would have nothing to base their permit decisions on.”

Councilman Kamau Marcharia (District 4) asked Croom how the bill would affect the flow of out of state waste, something opponents of the bill have been saying for months would increase under the new legislation.

“If I wanted to come and build a landfill in your community, if I wanted to bring nuclear waste from New York or wherever and drop it in your community, we would have absolutely nothing to say about it?” Marcharia asked.

“Not if you don’t own the hole you don’t,” Croom said.

But supporters of the legislation, including local senator Creighton Coleman (D-17), say that is not true, and documents from DHEC appear to back that position up.

Coleman and other supporters have said that the only goal of these bills is to amend the state’s Solid Waste Management Act to prevent counties from dictating where private waste disposal companies dump their waste. In 2009, Horry County did just that, passing an ordinance mandating that waste picked up in Horry County must be dumped in the landfill owned and operated by Horry County, and paying whatever fees Horry County established. That ordinance, Coleman and others say, created a de facto monopoly, preventing a private company from disposing of waste at a cheaper facility across county lines. H.3290 and S. 203 address that and nothing more, they claim.

Last month, Coleman inquired of DHEC about any other possible ramifications of the bill, specifically when it comes to out of state waste.

“(t)his bill does not affect any legal requirements with regard to out-of-state waste,” DHEC wrote in a letter of response, dated April 24. “We have thoroughly reviewed the language of this bill and see no basis for reaching such a conclusion. Nor does the bill change the requirement of the Solid Waste Management Act that requires a waste facility be consistent with a county’s local solid waste management plan.”

The bill does, DHEC noted, address consistency with zoning and land use ordinances.

“In that case, H.3290 empowers the counties by allowing them to present a letter of consistency to DHEC in order to satisfy the zoning and land use consistency requirements of the Solid Waste Management Act,” DHEC wrote. “(H.3290) does not affect current environmental laws and regulations other than adding the requirement that solid waste processing facilities register, report volume and prove financial responsibility to the department.”

H.3290 is intended to work out an economic, rather than an environmental issue, DHEC said, adding, “We made this view clear to the interests on both sides of this issue.”

The Voice recently acquired a copy of an internal memo, generated by DHEC in 2010 following their analysis of the Horry County ordinance. That memo indicates a concern within DHEC about public landfill capacity and how that might change, for the worse, if all 46 counties adopted similar ordinances.

“If every one of the 46 counties is allowed to in effect ‘hoard’ its waste by prohibiting it from leaving the county, it would have a significant negative impact on the regional concept so strongly promoted in the (Solid Waste Management) Act,” the memo states.

The General Assembly previously limited the amount of allowable landfill space in the state through the Determination of Needs regulation, the memo notes, and Horry County’s ordinance runs counter to that.

“A single county flow control ordinance may not in itself reverse the direction the state has taken in managing solid waste,” the memo states, “but certainly a proliferation of similar county ordinances would.”

N.C. Firm Offers Revitalization Services

WINNSBORO – What to do with the Old Armory? It has, for many years, been steadily slipping into a state of advanced decay, and Tuesday night Town Council learned that all of their options carry a hefty price tag.

John Dunham, with the Greenville architectural firm DP3, presented Council with their options, following a study of the building.

“It has some great bones to it,” Dunham said. “It’s a great building. It does, obviously, need a lot of work, ranging anywhere from code issues to aesthetics to its functionality. It’s obviously suffered from deferred maintenance.”

The Town’s first option, Dunham said, was to renovate the building as it is now, at a total cost of $1,329,922.28. That includes $216,972.50 just to bring the building up to code, and nearly $92,000 to replace the roof.

The second option, to demolish the building and replace it with a prefabricated metal structure, would cost the Town $1,258,975. Third, the Town could demolish the building and replace it with a brick structure, at a cost of $2,145,250.

Council took no action on Dunham’s report. Council also took no action on a proposal by Jess Kryzenske, Community Development Manager for HandMade in America, an Asheville, N.C., firm vying to help kick start the revitalization of downtown Winnsboro at a cost of $9,500 to the Town.

Kryzenske said her group has helped lead grassroots efforts in nearly a dozen small towns in Western North Carolina over the last 20 years and said she believes they can do the same for Winnsboro. By bringing community leaders together and utilizing the work of volunteers, she said, new life could be breathed into downtown. Kryzenske said her group works primarily through what she called “placemaking,” something she later defined as identifying specific things unique to the community – history and historic homes, in Winnsboro’s case – and helping the community highlight and market those features.

Outgoing Councilman Bill Haslett made HandMade a cornerstone of his recent failed bid for mayor, telling an audience at a candidate’s forum in March that, if elected, he would bring HandMade – and jobs – to Winnsboro.

“Towns are moving forward through volunteerism,” Haslett said Tuesday night. “It’s not up to the Town or the County to do these things.”

Councilman Clyde Sanders said he was concerned with keeping a group of volunteers together, focused and dedicated to a revitalization project.

“The success of this is not based on the Council, it’s based on citizen participation and business owners,” Sanders said. “My only question is what kind of participation are you going to have? Nine thousand dollars is not a lot of money to some people, but it is a lot of money to the Town of Winnsboro. I question the participation and the dedication of the people in the town. I think, just judging from past experience, you’d have a lot of people come out to the first meeting to see what’s going on, then it dwindles and then it stops.”

Mayor Roger Gaddy said it was vital to find out what the community wants before launching a long-term project. Kryzenske said one thing her group helped towns do was to constantly recruit new people to the process, in order to compensate for those who drop off, while maintaining a dedicated core of volunteers. Councilman Danny Miller requested that the Town speak with other towns on HandMade’s resume to get a feel for what kind of success they have experienced.

Kryzenske said she spent two days surveying Winnsboro two weeks ago, and suggested that, if Council doesn’t opt to go with HandMade’s proposal, they should seek out some outside firm to help bring the community together and focus local energies on a common goal.

FAIRFIELD – As Fairfield County code enforcement officers continue their sweep across the county, implementing the County’s tougher property maintenance codes, County Council is considering legislation that will make it easier to determine who, exactly, is responsible for one aspect of that code – hauling away abandoned or derelict mobile homes.

During their May 13 meeting, Council heard from consultant Dan Vismore and his recommendations to revise Ordinance 541, which in its current state, he said, places the onus for removing an abandoned or derelict mobile home on either the land owner or the “local official;” i.e., the County.

“It was not the intent of the County when they adopted this ordinance to get into the removal business of derelict mobile homes,” Vismore said. “What we are proposing to do is to strike reference to the ‘local official,’ so we will place the sole responsibility with the land owner.”

Vismore said that in many cases, the County has found that the owner of such a mobile home has abandoned not only the home, but the county as well, making it difficult to pin down responsibility for removing the home.

“And that has left us in a Catch-22,” he said. “That means that either the County is going to have to remove that mobile home, or we’ve got to place full and sole responsibility on the land owner that is housing that derelict mobile home.”

All costs associated with removing the home will, if the amendment to Ordinance 541 passes, become the responsibility of the landowner and can only be waived by an order from the Magistrate’s Court.

“That makes it simpler for us to administer, simpler for everybody to understand, there’s no contradiction as to who’s responsible and who’s not responsible, and it makes everybody’s job a whole lot easier,” Vismore said.

Councilwoman Carolyn Robinson (District 2) said there may be some difficulty in implementing the amendment, particularly when it comes to searching out and locating a legal title for abandoned mobile homes. And a legal title, she said, was required before any such home could be moved or even torn down.

“If it is abandoned and it is derelict and it’s impossible to get a title, based on your scenario, we either have to let it stand there because our hands are tied, or we exercise this revised ordinance and place the responsibility on the land owner to get that mobile home off of his property,” Vismore answered. “He (the land owner) was, in fact, the person responsible for allowing it to go on his property, so all we’ve done is to put the responsibility back on him to get it off of his property.”

If a legal title is required, Vismore made clear, it will be the property owner’s problem, and not the County’s.

John James, the County’s attorney, said it was his understanding that once a home was demolished, a title was not required to remove the remains, but agreed to research the law upon the request of Chairman David Ferguson. Council will take up Vismore’s recommendations again at their next regular meeting, June 10.