The construction and demolition operation at the Town of Bourne’s landfill was shut down this week due to a lack of funds.

Operations came to a halt on Wednesday, May 9, and officials say the facility will likely remain closed until the town’s new fiscal year begins on July 1.

ISWM General Manager Daniel T. Barrett said that the construction and demolition operation has its own expense line item in the overall landfill budget. Due to unforeseen expenses in recent months, all the money allocated to operation of the transfer station for the current fiscal year has been spent, Mr. Barrett said.

“That line has been expended,” he said.

The closure does not impact weekly pickup of household trash and recyclables, only the construction and demolition waste operations.

The operation serves as a transfer station for the construction and demolition trades. Old, unwanted and demolished building supplies such as wood, metal and masonry are trucked into the site by contractors and dumped, for a fee. Workers at the site then take the material to one of two off-Cape facilities where it is recycled or destroyed.

Mr. Barrett said that, ironically, the transfer station is a victim of its own success. He pointed out that the station has taken in approximately 2,000 tons more debris this year than last year. That increased amount of debris is reflective of a correlative increase in the home and commercial construction markets due to the economy doing better, he said.

“Lots of construction and building is taking place. Homes built, remodeling, building construction are all up and so is the need to get rid of the debris,” he said.

The flip side to that increase in tonnage, and one of the factors that has led to the depletion of the budget, is the increased cost to have it processed. Anything recyclable, such as copper, is pulled from the debris and resold by those end processors. However, the recycling market is not as lucrative as it used to be and that has led to increased drop-off fees, he said.

“Whenever they lose in the recycling market, they jack up the tipping fee,” he said.

Another hit to the budget came with the need to replace a broken transmission on one of the operation’s bulldozers. The cost to replace the transmission came to roughly $90,000. He described the replacement expense as “catastrophic” to the budget.

Mr. Barrett said that the closure would not jeopardize any of the landfill workers’ jobs. He said that employees assigned to the construction and demolition operation would be reassigned to other work being done at the facility.

“No one’s getting laid off. We’ll maintain our staff,” he said.

The construction and demolition operation’s budget for this year was set at $600,000,Mr. Barrett said. Companies dropping off construction and demolition debris at the Bourne landfill are charged $115 per ton, Mr. Barrett said. The debris taken in is then hauled away to one of two facilities off Cape, JR Vinagro in Johnston, Rhode Island, or Champion City Recovery in Brockton. It costs an average of $85 per ton to haul the material away, he said.

The $30 difference is used to cover the operation’s expenses, which came to approximately $25 per ton in Fiscal Year 2017, Mr. Barrett said. That leaves a $5 per ton profit margin. Of that amount, $3.60 per ton goes directly to the town’s general fund, as a host community fee.

The average annual total of construction and demolition debris over the last several years has been 17,000 tons, he said. He projected that closing the transfer station for the remainder of May and all of June would result in a loss of $15,000 to $20,000, with $9,000 of that being the host community fee.

To read the full story, visit https://www.capenews.net/bourne/news/budget-shortfall-brings-bourne-s-landfill-c-d-operation-to/article_82a674a5-c122-54f5-9b17-c8d588185ef1.html.

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