Too Mulch to Handle?

County’s Mulch Grinding Service Getting Expensive, Unwieldy

Commissioners accepted and awarded a bid for grinding mulch at the recycling center. The project will cost $77,140.70 this year.

The County provides a brush drop-off service for residents at the Fayette County Recycling Center. County road and bridge crews also dump brush at the site from clearing roadways. Each year the County hires a contractor to grind the brush into mulch. The Recycling Center sells the mulch at a price of $5 per pickup truck bed.

“The mulching is definitely a losing battle,” said Recycling Center Manager Paul Zapalac. “Each year it grows larger and larger. We get more brush. People move in and get some property out in the country – 15 or 20 acres. Instead of burning it right there, they bring it to the County. It’s only going to increase. The revenue is not there to continue it. So I don’t know what we are going to do moving forward.”

Burning the brush on site is out of the question. The Recycling Center’s brush yard sits atop an old landfill. The County cannot burn there due to concerns about methane gas, Zapalac said.

“There are companies who will mulch brush on your property, and I wish more people would use that service if they could,” said Pct. 3 Commissioner Harvey Berckenhoff. “Then it goes back into their property and fertilizes the soil. I guess that gets expensive.”

Plum resident William Bernsen asked whether the County could increase the fee for dumping at the site.

“We have,” Zapalac said. “We increased the fee from $35 to $150, and still people come in,” Zapalac said.

Pct. 4 Commissioner Drew Brossmann said rural development and the splitting of large properties into smaller tracts will likely make the problem worse in the future. He said people with small tracts will be less likely to burn brush near their homes.

“For people who have been here for a long time, they know how important it is to keep the taxes down,” Brossmann said. “So when trees fall down on their road, they tell us to go throw it in their pasture on a pile. If I’m all the way out in Dubina, and I don’t have anybody in that area who allows me to dump there, then I have to go all the way to Schulenburg or all the way to La Grange. Look at all those manhours and fuel and all that. I even tell them that if you allow us to pile it up, my crew will come by on a good day and burn it for you. It saves us a ton of money, not only on the manhours, but also the grinding.”

“It would be nice if we could have one of the local gravel pits, somewhere that was close, so that we could push (brush) in there and have one of the local fire departments come and burn what we have there,” Berckenhoff said. “We would have to find a place to do that, a nice deep hole.”

Zapalac anticipates the grinding cost to rise even higher next year. He said he plans to allot $100,000 for the project in next year’s budget.