The loss of funding for the Cabell County Solid Waste Authority’s recycling program might seem like the beginning of the program’s end to some, but for the authority’s board members, it has set the stage for a new beginning altogether if county taxpayers agree.
Members of the authority plan to ask the Cabell County Commission to allow county voters to decide in a referendum in the Nov. 8 general election whether they want to establish a levy to sustain and possibly expand the recycling program.
Authority Board President Stephen Zoeller and board member Tom Bell talked about the state of the county’s recycling program and how the levy proposal would ensure the program’s future during a meeting with The Herald-Dispatch Editorial Board Friday afternoon.
Board members are pushing for a levy rate of 0.3 of a cent per each $100 of assessed value on a property.
If the levy were established, it would provide $318,985 annually to support the recycling program and would make the program’s sustainability less susceptible to market value of recycled products and budget shortages like those being faced by the state of West Virginia and municipalities therein, Zoeller said.
“This levy would establish a baseline where we could establish a recycling program that was independent of the market value of recyclables,” Zoeller said. “The problem with recycling and a lot of other programs like this is governments consider it a marginal activity, so you’re always underfunded. We could sustain this program indefinitely as long as the levy was in place.”
At the proposed tax rate, a Cabell County resident with a home worth $100,000 and having an assessed value for tax purposes of $60,000 would pay roughly an additional $1.80 in property taxes per year if the levy was passed. The authority began its drop-off recycling program in 2011 with 37 bins at eight locations, but three of those locations were put out of commission on June 30 as the authority lost funding from the Cabell County Commission and the city of Milton.
Bell said the authority has recycled more than 8 million pounds of materials since the program began, and about 100 tons of materials are recycled each month through a contract with Rumpke Recycling.
Officials began looking for options for the recycling program in 2015 after Rumpke more than doubled its annual charge to collect and process the materials from $40,000 to more than $80,000.
To read the full story, visit http://www.herald-dispatch.com/news/agency-proposes-tax-to-save-recycling/article_6c1142e3-970e-5bcf-bbd0-4603976565cd.html.