The Homer City Council passed a resolution on Feb. 10 asking the Kenai Peninsula Borough to waive disposal fees for inert waste at the Homer Landfill.

According to Resolution 25-009, the KPB Solid Waste Department doubled inert waste disposal fees at the Homer landfill, from $45 per ton to $90 per ton, on Jan. 1, 2024. Inert waste includes construction or demolition debris, scrap metals, tires, appliances and “brush/slash,” or land clearing debris.

The resolution describes the fee increase as a burden on city budgets, particularly for the Public Works Department, which routinely clears city rights of way of debris and disposes of scrap metals such as used culverts, old fire hydrants and metal pipes at the landfill.

In a Jan. 15 memorandum to the council, Public Works Director Daniel Kort wrote that due to the fee increase, a single right of way clearing project in the spring of 2024 exceeded the city’s total annual budgeted amount for brush disposal for a fiscal year.

Part of the issue also stems from the weight-to-volume ratio for scrap metals disposed of by the city being “much higher” than standard inert waste.

Kort previously held the KPB Solid Waste Director position and, he wrote, has “extensive knowledge” on the methods and costs associated with waste management at KPB facilities.

According to Kort, over the past several years the borough has either managed brush/slash disposal in-house or contracted management out. Brush management via a contractor has historically cost less than $10 per ton on an annual basis — less than that if management was done in-house.

Similarly, the borough spends approximately $1-5 per ton to manage scrap metals — maintained in a segregated pile separate from other types of inert waste — and on an “at least annual” basis, Peninsula Scrap and Salvage visits KPB landfills to bale scrap metals for recycling at no charge.

“In general, the borough tries to maintain the disposal rates at a rate reflective of the cost to manage and dispose of the waste material,” Kort wrote in the memo. “In the case of scrap metals and brush/slash, it appears as though these disposal fees are significantly higher than the management costs.”

Kort further noted that the borough offers free disposal to KPB residents and only charges disposal fees to commercial entities.

“(KPB) municipalities are classified as a commercial disposer,” he wrote. “However, these municipalities are technically an aggregation of residential disposers and the waste they generate is more related to the service the municipality provides to (their residents), which are KPB residents.

“Additionally, the municipalities do not generate revenue from these activities like other ‘commercial disposers,’ so it doesn’t make sense to group municipal disposers (with) commercial disposers.”

Kort reached out to the borough solid waste director in June to request that scrap metal and brush/slash be separated from the inert waste fee or that municipalities being exempted annually from disposal fees associated with scrap metals or brush/slash. After receiving no response, he reached out again in September and was told that the solid waste director was “not interested in creating a new fee structure,” but would consider development of a fee waiver for the City of Homer.

Kort wrote that “there were no returned follow-up conversations on this topic by the Solid Waste Director” after September.

Resolution 25-009 formally requests that the borough provide a fee waiver for brush/slash and scrap metal disposal and authorizes City Manager Melissa Jacobsen to negotiate disposal terms with the borough.

Find the resolution in full at www.cityofhomer-ak.gov/citycouncil/city-council-regular-meeting-337.