After four years of planning for it as a cost-saving measure, last week’s rollout of a yearlong pilot program closing King County’s lone landfill on weekends created — well, a bit of a mess.
Garbage piled high over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend at the county’s eight transfer stations, where trash is deposited before drivers transport it to the Cedar Hills Regional Landfill near Maple Valley. Many of those stations had to close to commercial garbage haulers for hours last Tuesday and Wednesday as they were at capacity, creating long lines for drivers waiting to complete their routes.
Meanwhile, garbage haulers faced dizzyingly long lines at the landfill last week, including a line of at least two dozen trucks at one point Wednesday, compared with a typical line of just one or two trucks, said Michael Gonzales, staff director of Teamsters Local 174, the union representing King County’s garbage haulers, transfer station operators and scale operators.
“This week has been a blur,” he said by phone last Wednesday. “They’re professionals and they’re working through it, but it’s been super stressful.”
After back-to-back days of closures, county leaders said transfer stations were running normally Thursday.
Seattle residents were not affected by the change, as the city has its own waste collection and disposal system. King County residents who wanted to drop off their own trash were also not affected.
But it will take more than a few weeks to see whether the pilot program is working as intended, said John Taylor, director of the King County Department of Natural Resources and Parks, which oversees the Solid Waste Division.
“If every week is this big a challenge, we’re going to be asking ourselves some hard questions about the model we’ve set up and how we’re going to proceed,” he said Thursday. “We’re three days in — let’s give it a shot and see how it goes and let’s see how the system responds to it.”
Pat McLaughlin, director of King County’s Solid Waste Division, said the agency first thought of closing the landfill on weekends in 2020.
The agency — which is funded through revenue collected at its sites as drivers pay to drop off trash and not through county taxes or a general fund — could save up to $3 million a year by closing the landfill on Saturdays and Sundays, the least busy days of the week for commercial garbage haulers. Those savings could prevent future rate increases for customers who pay to have their trash picked up, McLaughlin said.
The agency informed Teamsters Local 174 of its plans in October 2020, sparking years of negotiating the collective bargaining agreement for the more than 50 garbage haulers in King County, whose workweek changed from seven days to five with the landfill’s weekend closure. The parties agreed to the change as a yearlong pilot program starting Jan. 18, McLaughlin said.
But launching the pilot over the holiday weekend created a “perfect storm” for long lines and larger trash piles, Taylor said. While individual customers and commercial garbage haulers continued dropping off trash at transfer stations, there were no drivers working to transport that trash to the landfill.
“By the end of Monday, everything was chock-full and we didn’t have anyone to haul it out,” Taylor said. “We had people beginning to haul on Tuesday, but they were trying to catch up with a significant amount of material, and it snowballed into Wednesday, and on Wednesday we just shut everything down.”
At the “Costco-sized” Bow Lake transfer station last Tuesday, a 20-foot wall of trash stretched from one end to another, leaving a pathway only large enough to accommodate a single piece of machinery, Gonzales said.
And garbage haulers hoping to escape long lines at the stations by taking their trash directly to the landfill were disappointed to find exceedingly long lines there, too, he said.
Conditions were better this Monday, Gonzales said.
A “major reason” for the improvement was because the county granted waste disposal company Republic Services permission to temporarily divert trash its drivers collected in King County to its own facility in Renton, rather than depositing it at one of the county’s eight stations.
Before they received permission to do so, Republic Services said it had considered a “short-term layoff” of its drivers for up to two days last week because of how limited service was at county-run disposal sites, the company said in a statement Monday.
And the diversion of that company’s trash on Thursday, Friday and Monday likely cost the solid waste division about half a million dollars in revenue per day, Gonzales said.
Doug Williams, a spokesperson for the King County Department of Natural Resources and Parks, on Monday acknowledged the county would lose some revenue because of the diversion, but said it would also avoid expenses at the landfill from taking the company’s trash. The county won’t know the financial effects of the diversion until February, he said.
Republic Services’ drivers returned to depositing their trash at King County’s transfer stations on Tuesday, but it’s unclear what the rest of this week, or the coming weeks, hold in store, Gonzales said.
“I really don’t know — I am watching this thing every day like everybody else,” Gonzales said. “All of us told them it wasn’t going to work.”
