OLIVE HILL, Ky. — Four northeastern Kentucky counties have continued to pump money, not garbage, into a county landfill since it “closed” more than 30 years ago.

The Grahn Landfill in northeastern Kentucky is still considered “open” by the state, despite the old landfill not accepting waste since about 1982.

It was then that Carter, Boyd, Lawrence and Elliott county officials — four of the five counties within the FIVCO Area Development District — agreed to cease operations of the regional landfill they had created in the 1970s.

Officials determined the Grahn landfill was no longer needed in the region based largely on a rise in privately owned dumping sites nearby, and it was subsequently capped.

Jon Maybriar, director of the Kentucky Waste Management Division, said the Grahn site is one of hundreds of what the state calls “orphan landfills,” and the fact that it is not completely closed after several years is not uncommon.

In the United States, so-called “orphan landfills” are defined as landfill spaces without private owners or operating companies. In recent decades, states like Oregon and Ohio have made efforts to cap their orphan landfills, citing environmental effects of leaving the spaces as is.

But the Grahn landfill still isn’t officially closed because leachate — liquid that percolates through the waste and often drains out of landfills during heavy rains — continues to pour from the site.

“To make a long story short,” said Kelly Ward, FIVCO economic development director, “since I’ve been here for the last 16 years, we’ve been trying to close this thing completely out. But we can’t close it out because we have to continue to do testing of that leachate and haul it out of there.”

The testing and removal of leachate is required by state and federal environmental agencies to ensure no harmful pollutants leak into nearby groundwater. FIVCO needs money to pay for that process, and the four counties must bankroll it. The county fiscal courts could technically decline to provide the funds, but they’d risk the EPA slapping them with fines of up to a $25,000 per day.

All four counties have provided the financial aid FIVCO sought throughout the past three decades. Between 2001 and 2007, the counties contributed a combined $48,000, according to FIVCO records.

Ward said he had not requested funding from the counties for the landfill in the past 10 years, as FIVCO was able to draw from its annual budget to pay for monthly testing. He’d renegotiated with contractors to test and haul the leachate at an affordable rate, less than $200 per month, for a few years, he said.

“Therefore, I was able to make the money go farther without needing to ask the counties for more funding,” he said.

But that special fund evaporated in recent years when the cost of testing “skyrocketed,” to $800 per month, or four times the amount FIVCO was paying, Ward said.

The cost increased after FIVCO had to acquire a new landfill permit through the Kentucky Division of Water, he said.

This year, FIVCO is asking each county for $3,000 to cover the costs associated with the landfill.

Ward said he does not relish the task of asking the counties for money, but until a permanent solution is realized, the counties will have to continue to pay.

“Unfortunately, it is a problem that we all have to inherit until we can figure out a way to get this thing closed,” he said.

Possible solutions

Maybriar told the Ashland, Kentucky, Daily Independent the state is working with the counties to develop a final remedial plan to take the landfill off the books.

“There’s been a lot of actions already taken,” Maybriar said. “They already capped the landfill. There are not any erosion problems that we are aware of. We’re strictly looking at treating the leachate.”

One remedial option is to extend a sewer line to send the leachate to a nearby wastewater treatment plant, rather than continue to pay for hauling from the site, Maybriar said.

The counties could also turn the old landfill site, which is five to 10 acres, into a wetland, Maybriar said.  

Why the wait?

Ward said there’s likely not “one thing to blame for why it’s taken so long” to officially close the landfill. The delay could be a result, in part, of turnover in state and county administrations.

“As new judge-executives and fiscal courts have come along, I’ve had to explain to them that they have a problem,” Ward said.

Maybriar said state officials had met with previous judges-executive several years ago to discuss closing the landfill.

In 2005, the state announced through a news release the landfill in Carter County was one of several dumping sites “designated for assessment, design and remediation action.”

The closure projects were carried out through the Kentucky Pride Program, created by the General Assembly through a 2002 House bill. The legislation provided for the state to “assist with costs of closure and remediation of inactive city and county solid-waste landfills that ceased accepting waste before 1992, when more stringent waste laws took effect.”

Funding for the projects came from an “environmental remediation fee paid by generators of waste disposed at municipal solid waste landfills,” and from a $25 million bond issue, per the release.

Former Carter County Judge-Executive Charles Wallace told the newspaper “plans were all drawn up eight years ago” to close the landfill, but funding from the state was pulled and used for other purposes.

By 2008, the state had collected $2.5 million from environmental remediation fees, according to the Kentucky Division of Waste Management Annual Report released that year. The Grahn landfill was one of several orphan landfills considered to be “old town dumps,” according to the report, and was to be properly closed through the state program.

Final designs were created for closure of the Grahn landfill, and the state was waiting for funding for construction bid advertisements, per the report. The estimated cost of the project would have been about $1.5 million.

The project continued to be included in Division of Waste Management reports each year until 2014. By then, the state had closed 58 “historic landfills” through the program. As of last year, the state had closed 90 “historical landfills,” and 531 still needed to be closed. The Grahn landfill, or “FIVCO landfill” as it’s referred to in the reports, has not been listed as a project in progress since 2013.

Adkins writes for the Ashland, Kentucky Daily Independent.