Talking trash with Mayor Estenson

At the September 17 Thermopolis Town Council meeting, Mayor Adam Estenson and the council voted and passed the approval to go into a purchase agreement of 3.63 acres of land between the Owl Creek Hill Road and Highway 120 on the west side of town as the location of a new transfer station.

The Mayor and Town Council will hold a special meeting open to the public on October 1 at 5:30 p.m. prior to their regular meeting. Mayor Estenson said, “Want to cover how we got here, how a transfer station operates and the timeline going forward.”  Additionally, there has been much discussion in the community over the subject of the transfer station. The Thermopolis Independent Record has been covering this in detail for a considerable amount of time over the years. 

In the May 20, 2021 issue, we reported about what exactly a transfer station is and how it works, and why it is being considered to be built. In the April 29, 2021 issue, we reported about how an engineer provided detailed information about the transfer station and other options the town has for handling waste and the imminent closure of the landfill. In the March 10, 2022 issue, we reported on how the council received a status update on the transfer station matter. In the April 24, 2024 issue, we reported on how the town was considered an alternative location for the transfer station. All in all, the Independent Record has covered talks about transfer station since October 15, 2015.

Mayor Adam Estenson provided some historical background on the transfer station subject and answered some questions about the council’s decision-making.

Why is the town building a transfer station?

Mayor Estenson replied, “The state is requiring us to shut the landfill down. And the reason is that the state has been in a big push in the last 15 years or so to start closing down these smaller municipal landfills. I think part of it is that the federal EPA and the monitoring requirements, all that it becomes very cost-prohibitive to have all these landfills, all over the place. So if you start to consolidate where those places are, it becomes more cost-effective for the state and other users to have all of that in one place.”

“But the other part is the requirements for permitting additional cells. To permit new cells, typically you have to line the cells. For a long time, they were lined with just benamat, which is a bentonite manufactured product.”

“They’re lined with an impervious liner. It is a liner product usually made of a combination of plastic, polymer rubbers, and other ingredients. And they were using a lot of bentonite-type products. Well, what the monitoring has found in many older landfills is that the primordial ooze that comes out of decomposing trash actually interacts with the molecular level of bentonite and starts to break it down and make it not impervious anymore. It becomes pervious. And so, they’ve moved to these more highly engineered products and those products are extremely cost prohibitive.”

“The last numbers that were really run on lining the cell, like one of our cell sizes out here, which gets about five years of use. But with the amount of cardboard and shipping and packaging and anything anymore that is starting to dwindle. But to line that was about $1.2 million. You don’t have a lot of longevity there and you’d have to have additional cells in years to come.”

“We’re to a point where we’re running out of cells in this particular landfill. So you could go find another space and permit it. It’s a very long process with the EPA anymore to permit new landfills.”

What is a transfer station?

Mayor Estenson replied, “The transfer station is a building, basically a warehouse-type building. In the design that we’re looking at, it’s a very simple operation. It has two components to it. One is the working floor. That’s where trash is brought in and dumped. There are other options too where you would dump directly into your drop floor so that you’re not getting any trash on your actual concrete. So you’re not grinding it into concrete.”

“But for simplicity, you have a working floor and that’s where trash is dropped by the collection trucks and/or residents hauling their own trash. Then that trash is pushed into a drop floor, which is what it sounds like. It sits below. It’s pushed over down into a trailer that’s sitting there waiting. And then that semi-trailer, once it’s full, or it depends on how you operate it and how it’s permitted, but it’ll be every 1 or 2 days that trailer then leaves with that trash and goes to a landfill somewhere else. Which landfills? We don’t know yet. It’ll depend on who we can get a contract with. That’s one of the scary variables in all of this is, where can you take it? But there are options, and DEQ will be heavily involved in that part of the process.”

Who will transfer the trash from the town to the transfer station? 

Mayor Estenson replied, “The town will still haul its own trash to the transfer station. We’re going to keep the dumpsters. As I’ve been speaking with people, and as I was running for mayor, by and large, they want to keep the dumpsters. Another option in all of this was to say, scrap it all. Take the state’s money to close the landfill, and put out all the trash haul for bid. So you’d have, like, Wyoming Waste, Hopper Waste, Waste Management, etc. Any one of those companies would come in and have a franchise agreement, like we do for natural gas, electric, and all that, and then bring them in and just let them run everything. But then you’re going to have a little roll-away cans. You’re going to have trash picked up once a week,  or maybe every other week. And you have really no cost control. Because inevitably one or all of those companies gets bought out by the conglomerate of waste management, and now you’re at their whim and you’re paying their prices. The town is going to stay in business to haul in the trash.”

Who will take the trash from the transfer station to outside entities? 

Mayor Estenson replied, “The town will do that. It is because again, you can manage your cost. We as the town then get to employ someone.”

And that’s not Ryan Brothers? 

Mayor Estenson replied, “No. Most commercial motor carrier insurances will not underwrite trash hauls. Your companies that have the ability to come in and do that are few and far between. There are specific companies that are like in salvage operations, those sorts of things that have specific insurance for that. But most of your larger trucking companies around do not have insurance to even haul trash in the first place. And that would definitely include Ryan Brothers.”

“The town hauling the trash from the transfer station does a lot of things. You can guarantee when that truck rolls out of the transfer station and make sure that you don’t get hung out for 3 or 4 days waiting for someone to come grab that trailer. And then you’re not paying a trucker’s rates. You’re on the whims of some other company saying, hey, you know what? We’re going to start charging you this now for it.”

The town will invest in a truck and trailer to haul the trash from the transfer station.

What about garbage rates for the town residents?

Will they increase? 

Mayor Estenson replied, “We’re still very early in the process for those. I’m not going to mince words. The price will go up. I don’t know what it’ll be at this point because we’re still early in the stages of things. Obviously, our goal through this whole project is going to be to keep our construction costs as low as we can so that we don’t have to have major increases.”

If the town were to use Waste Management, farm out the service and privatize, go through the bidding process, would that still be more expensive than what you’re doing? 

Mayor Estenson replied, “Yes. For Thermopolis residents, it’s $22 a month, for the commercial rate is about $115 for one dumpster. This is where it needs to be vetted. But I have talked to people like in Casper, who pay almost $40 a month for their residential trash. And you don’t have the luxury of just walking out of your house and putting your trash in a dumpster, and then you’re done with it. There, you have to remember that Tuesday is your pickup day, or every other Tuesday is your pickup day. And if you forget, what do you do? Or if you miss it? And then it’s Wyoming. So guess what? The wind blows around here. So everybody goes out and puts their cans out. The wind comes and blows. There is trash everywhere.”

“In the grand scheme of things, I don’t anticipate that our fees would get above or beyond that. But we are in kind of a volatile place with our economy, and no one expected our utility rates, our electricity to go up as much as it did in two successive years in a row. Didn’t expect natural gas to go up as much as it did. Those things all play into these. And those are the unknowns that are hard to answer. That gives people a good base of what they’re paying for now. And it’d be unfair for me to try to guess what it would be. But it would also be unfair for me to say, no, it’s not going to go up.”

“Having a landfill was a luxury. Your costs are minimal. It was built at a time when construction prices weren’t all that high. The hardship is the state forcing us to close the landfill. So the job becomes to manage that as best we can.”

What about the fees involved with the weighing part that we don’t know about?

How do you factor that into the operation?

Mayor Estenson replied, “That’ll be a conversation as we go forward. What will the fees be?

“More than likely, we will pay by weight. Right now you kind of pay by volume size, yardage kind of thing. But we’ll pay by weight. The great thing about being able to weigh our trash, which we don’t currently do, is we, as the town ourselves, will be able to know how much trash we’re actually hauling. And once you have those numbers in that data, now you can start to really break down your costs. We do not have a fair assessment of what we haul for trash.”

What about concerns about smell or odors from the transfer station?

Mayor Estenson replied, “If we are doing our job, it’s not going to smell. Actually, yesterday I spent some time on the phone with a few different municipalities. But the one in particular was with the sanitation supervisor in Powell. Because their transfer station is in a residential area. And it’s adjacent to some community facilities, like a baseball park.”

“It was great because he was like, if your people need to come to tour this, there’s a great network of these transfer station operators throughout the state of Wyoming, and they’re very eager and willing to share their best practices and all that. They don’t have any complaints of smell out of their facility.”

“He said that the only time you get to have any smell in the building itself is at the height of the summer when it’s hot. And you might have grass clippings there, but, basically, their procedure is if it starts to smell in the building a little bit, they just haul it. They just take that trailer out and then go.”

Is it true that the EPA would give a waiver and the bedrock would prevent contamination?

Mayor Estenson replied, “Yes and no. It is true that you can get a waiver from having to line a landfill. Hot Springs County Commissioner Paul Galovich and I actually had a lot of conversations, and he did a lot of legwork in 2023. I know of at least one trip he took, actually, down to Cheyenne to basically petition for that. He’s a county commissioner. The landfill isn’t even really in his purview, but he took it upon himself to go do that because he sees the importance of having that option. A place for county residents to haul their trash and then for the town of Thermopolis as well.”

“So those are true. But I believe part of Worland landfill actually has a waiver. It’s not lined, but there are a lot of factors that have to align for that waiver to happen. And the way you figure out if you can actually have that waiver is through some massive engineering studies. The initial way it was explained to me was that the initial cost of that type of study on our existing cells would be about somewhere between $100,000 to $300,000 to do the studies to even find out if you are viable. At the end of the study you can come back in to find out, no, it’s not viable for the waiver.”

“The initial look at the geology, the distance to the river and to the water table in those areas, it would be a long shot to get a waiver at the landfill. And then, at the end of that, you’re only getting that waiver for the 3 or 4 cells that are even available out there.”

“At that point, with that information, when I became mayor, it was a restart on the conversation a little bit. Previous administrations have done a lot of legwork on this. If the transfer station is built here in the next 2 or 3 years, it’s built on the coattails of the mayors that have come before me.”

Why did you avoid the old location that was decided upon?

“That location was an acre-per-acre land swap. Acquiring the land was a minimal cost. In the initial meetings that the administration had with WYDOT, the commercial access off of Highway 20 was granted…Questions were asked at that time. Mayor Chimenti, Assistant to the Mayor Fred Crosby, and all the leadership teams. They asked good questions. Can we do it? Then, in the restart of conversation, I had great concern because of my experience driving a truck, particularly on that part of the highway. With having trucks that are going to be turning in and out of there. Not to mention the Fountain Youth down there. You have motorhomes and campers and things pulling in and out all the time. There was great concern. That was about the same time that WYDOT started looking a little deeper as we approached reality that this is we’re really going to close the landfill and we’re gonna have to do a transfer station.”

“Basically, as I started to unpack what a commercial entrance looks like, it became apparent that yes, you’re going to have to have a turn lane. I realized that their regional assessment was not accurate. Not accurate, or it had not been fully assessed because it was kind of in the initial stages. And I think it would have been a little more in-depth had the town actually had to purchase that ground…The WYDOT conversation did change and a turning lane became a requirement, with great concern from WYDOT.”

“We start looking at, well, what’s the cost of a turning lane? Because we have to do something. You can’t just turn out of that lane. With that knowledge, we’re responsible for it now, right? I’m going to be as bold as to say we would have killed someone there with that setup.”

“I mean, once you put that into play, what’s a life worth? When we look at it, a turning lane would cost roughly about a half million dollars. And that was a year ago at those costs. Costs are ever-rising here. You’re going about a half a million dollars there and then you’re looking at about another quarter million just to approve the road up to the previous transfer station site.”

“The additional part is you have a substantial grade. The hill is substantial going up into that property. With proper design, you could get in there, but it would be problematic for a tractor-trailer rig to go in and out of there.”

How did you decide on the new location?

Mayor Estenson replied, “We went back to the drawing board and, like I said, previous administrations had done a lot of legwork on this. There were other sites that have been identified. I think that might have been 10 or 15 years ago. The majority of those sites all are within the floodplain of the river.”

“The big deal is here, DEQ and the state have money that they’re providing for this project. And so with that, they have some say in where these things go. They will not permit or pay for a transfer station in the flood zone.”

“We started looking at viable sites. A few of those sites had been developed. So they weren’t viable anymore. They’re off the table. We started looking at a site on the Owl Creek Hill Road area platted as Commercial Park West subdivision for about 3.5 acres in size.”

“The location does not block the view of the Wind River Canyon, which was a concern from one of the town’s residents who owns property nearby. The land in front of the concerned citizen’s property is a triangle-shaped land belonging to WYDOT and the proposed site is closer up towards the hill.”

“When we looked at that site, it really became the only other viable site that wasn’t in the floodplain that was within a reasonable distance to town.”

“The other part is we started going through our options with that natural topography bench there. It limits the amount of earthwork we actually have to do. We’re not going to have to bring in a bunch of earth to build up, to have a drop floor in this transfer station.”

The cost of the land is $300,000. How do you justify that price?

Mayor Estenson replied, “Being that close to town, we’re really close to the utilities. Water, sewer, gas, fiber, and electric, are very close. Our costs to bring those to the facility are minimal. Compared to the previously permitted site where you would have had to bring those utilities quite a distance. That was another kind of trade-for-trade cash-positive conversation for this one. It’s already platted commercial. With the topography, we’re not going to have a lot of development. But when you start to look at anybody who has bought land around here, raw land lately, the prices are high. Yes, I agree it is a high price to pay for that property, but I think it’s a fair value for what we’re getting.”

What about concerns about devaluing the surrounding properties? 

Mayor Estenson replied, “I think a lot of people think a transfer station is basically just a concrete pad where you dump trash until it piles up and then you pick it up and take it. Well, it’s an enclosed building, and from the outside appearance, it’s not going to be any different from a building that would be built in a commercial subdivision. As far as devaluing land, I don’t know that that’s a fair assessment because what you are going to be doing is actually developing land around the property owners. When land gets developed around other properties, property values generally increase.”

“Specifically, to the point that you’re going to have a municipality running this. It’s not someone else. Municipalities, we take care of our property, especially here in Thermopolis. You’re not going to have junk equipment and parts and things sitting around all over the place. It should actually increase because you’re developing the surrounding land.”

“And because we’re the first one to develop, there will be bringing the utilities to that subdivision. Now those other lots are actually going to probably increase in value and become more marketable.”

What about previous administrations and their work on the transfer station project?

Mayor Estenson replied, “In anything we’re doing here, it’s not a criticism of previous administrations, because, like I said, we are working on a lot of their coattails, because a lot of these questions had been asked. So when it was time to reassess, there was a lot of data for me and the current council to look at. And so we were able to move a little bit quicker on this. But time is of the essence. And I think whether it had been me or Mayor Chimenti in the hot seat this term, the sense of urgency would be in place.”

“There’s been some criticism about this previous location property and they’ve already put some money into it, but that site still gives us great secondary access to the golf course property, and is in alignment with some of the work the county commissioners are doing. So that is not all for naught, and it’s not a waste up there.”