BURNS — This small town situated along Interstate 80 in southeast Wyoming has locked up its compost yard to keep Cheyenne businesses from taking advantage of its free disposal site to avoid paying their local dumping fees.
The city of Cheyenne charges $5 per cubic yard for commercial businesses to drop off compost and other organic waste. It also collects a fee of 25 cents per pallet and requires all trucks to be covered with a tarp.
Burns Mayor Joe Nicholson told Cowboy State Daily his town’s compost yard, which does not charge a dumping fee for town residents or require tarping, has received far more brush and tree branches than any vehicles in Burns could leave behind.
His theory is that Cheyenne is the only city in the vicinity that could produce such a volume of organic waste.
“You can actually see the branches if you look as you drive from Cheyenne,” Nicholson said about the trail left by untarped trucks. “There was actually a side-dump semitrailer that came out and dumped.
"We don’t imagine anyone in the outlying community has a side-dump semitrailer.”
Nicholson said the issue has gotten so out of control that Burns was forced to lock its compost pit until the town can decide how to ensure only locals are allowed to dump for free.
He said town leaders will meet Monday to consider several options.
“Cheyenne charges for people to dump this stuff versus us, who have always offered it to the community as a service to the town,” Nicholson said. “We need to come up with a better system.”
Now if town residents want to dispose of compost material and yard waste, they have to first get a key to the lock from town hall.
Cheyenne Compost
Cheyenne Mayor Patrick Collins told Cowboy State Daily he had not heard any concerns from Burns that businesses from his city were taking advantage of the compost site.
The mayor confirmed, however, that he had met with his staff about the issue and promised to help find a resolution.
“We're going to look at seeing what we can do to help those businesses,” he said. “Right now, there is a private hauler that would take that trash for a fee, of course, and they would use it, would take care of it. But we're going to look and see what we can do.”
Collins said the city’s many landscaping and tree removal companies produce a significant volume of compost material, some of which can't be accommodated by Cheyenne’s pit.
He said the city could enlist the help of other businesses to handle the waste, or it could consider opening up its landfill to additional compost.
Collins also said Cheyenne could not do away with its dumping fees because of the limited capacity the city has to hold trash and compost.
“If you're going to put it into our landfill, airspace is the most precious thing we have, right?” he said. “When you're talking about the commercial businesses, there's just so much that we probably couldn't use it through our composting facility.
"There's just not enough demand for that much compost, so we'll have to figure out a way going forward. I can assure you that it won’t be something we’ll do for free.”
But Burns does, which entices some to drive 30 miles down I-80 to dump their compost waste for free instead of paying for the service in Cheyenne, Nicholson said.
Rick Fierro, owner of Cheyenne-based Mountain Stone Landscaping, told Cowboy State Daily his company will sometimes take trash to Burns, but never compost.
He added that the overall demand for compost fluctuates often, making it hard to predict how much to produce at a time.
“Compost is an interesting market because it's hot and cold, it's hard to make, there's so many things involved with it,” he said. “And of course, the city of Cheyenne has their own composting program, and it wouldn't make any sense to me why anybody would haul anything to make compost to Burns when they could bring it to the city of Cheyenne.”
Fierro said that Cheyenne’s compost facility can’t create enough to fulfill his company’s needs, forcing him to turn elsewhere.
“I buy compost out of state because the city can't produce enough and they won't sell to me in any kind of volume,” he said. “I buy truckloads of it.”
Burns’s Battle
Nicholson said he and town leaders are stumped for a solution that would allow Burns residents to continue to enjoy free use of the site while keeping out Cheyenne businesses.
“There’s 65,000 people in Cheyenne,” Nicholson said. “How do you monitor, how do you stop that?”
Imposing a fee in Burns would become a disservice to residents and could even lead some to leave their brush lying about the town, he said.
“It would increase the amount of dumped compost on the side of the roads,” Nicholson said. “We’ve seen that before. It’s organic, it will eventual break down, but we’d rather have it in one spot.”
Another potential solution would involve installing a key card reader at the compost site that would grant access to residents who pay to use the town’s exercise facilities.
“We issue key cards for the exercise room for town hall so maybe we can put some of those out here so people that pay the $20 per month would have access to the compost pile,” he said.
Nicholson said he is also kicking around the idea of introducing an on-call worker who could drive to the dump site to grant access to Burns residents.
“An on-call number would be 24/7, but if you’re dumping in the middle of the night, it’s going to be very scrutinized,” he said.
Burns normally sets fire to its compost pit when it receives the first significant snowfall of the year, but that hasn’t happened yet as southeast Wyoming sits comfortably in the 60s and 70s.
Until the snow arrives, Nicholson said the town is scratching its head for answers.
“We had to shut it down due to the increased amount and with us not being able to burn it yet, we gotta come up with a better solution,” he said.
Jackson Walker can be reached at walker@cowboystatedaily.com.
