Spokane Valley resident questions changes to yard waste fees in windstorm’s aftermath

Spokane Valley resident John Schnagl got something he didn’t expect when he dropped off yard waste from last month’s windstorm at the Sullivan Road transfer station.

A bill.

“I didn’t have any paper,” said Schnagl, who’d been told by a friend they were accepting yard waste for free at the station. “And I said, ‘Tell me who to call about this.’”

On the back of Schnagl’s $12 receipt a worker wrote the name and phone number of the Spokane Valley city administrator, Mike Jackson.

The Sullivan Road station, run by Spokane County in Spokane Valley, stopped accepting yard waste for free Nov. 22. Free service continues in other areas of the county.

Spokane Valley elected not to join the regional solid waste system overseen by the county, and Schnagl initially took the note as a political notice the county no longer wanted to eat the cost of disposing of yard waste for residents not served by the county’s waste disposal system.

“I never expected to end up in the middle of it,” Schnagl said.

Schnagl has since talked to those in charge at Spokane County and believes the decision by Utilities Director Kevin Cooke to begin charging for yard waste collection on Nov. 23 at the facility in Spokane Valley was not politically motivated.

Cooke concurred in an interview Tuesday.

“I made the decision, and the recommendation to (county commissioners), that we extend at Colbert, because we have the benefit of a staging area immediately to the south,” Cooke said.

The station on Sullivan Road, which is 4 miles up the road from where Sunshine Disposal handles garbage produced in Spokane Valley, lacked an area for workers to prepare green waste for chipping, Cooke said, and the volume of waste was clogging the flow of other types of garbage.

“We were getting inundated there,” Cooke said. The county and city are not checking visitors’ addresses at their waste disposal locations, officials said.

Sunshine Disposal charged its usual rate following the storm, though it accepted yard waste larger than the maximum dimensions of 6 feet long and 3 inches in diameter required at the Sullivan Road station.

“The city of Spokane Valley has a separate contract,” Jackson said. “There are no government subsidies. It runs completely on the rates charged at the station.”

Spokane Valley and Liberty Lake elected not to join the Spokane Regional Solid Waste System when it switched ownership from the city of Spokane to the county in November 2014, instead signing with Sunshine Disposal to run the operation at 2405 N. University Road.

The decision already has created rifts. The county chose earlier this year to sue Sunshine, alleging the company was disposing of garbage at its own transfer station that should have gone to the two facilities run by the county and the Waste-to-Energy Plant, which remains under city of Spokane ownership.

Sunshine countersued, saying the solid waste laws the county passed pinched the business itestablished during several decades of providing waste management services in Spokane County and violated its constitutional right to do business here.

Both Cooke and Jackson said the decisions made in the aftermath of the deadly windstorm had nothing to do with the ongoing legal proceedings between the county and Sunshine.

“This is not something that we raised, it’s an issue raised by the citizens,” Jackson said, noting he’d received a few phone calls in response to fees being charged at the Sullivan Road station.

“This was an emergency situation,” Cooke said. “We were trying to provide a service, in light of that emergency, to help the region recover.”

Both men said they hoped for a continued partnership in response to the windstorm and other natural disasters.

Valley resident Schnagl said he was heartened to learn the city and county have partnered with Avista Utilities to take yard waste to a plant in Kettle Falls, where it will be turned into biofuel by subcontractor Cannon Hill Industries. But he was disappointed by his perception that storm cleanup was impeded by continued strife over garbage collection and disposal.

“In emergency situations, you just don’t pull this type of garbage,” he said.