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 Area residents used snowblowers, snow plows and snow shovels to dig out from a winter storm that hit late Friday and Saturday. Another storm is to hit tonight. Staff photo/William Laney MIKE BURKHOLDER
and WILLIAM LANEY
Staff Writers
A winter snow storm, which dumped as much as 3 feet in the Washington, D.C. area, hit the area with as much as 9 inches of snow in Wapakoneta and some areas of Auglaize County.
The snowfall came with high winds which created drifts as tall as 4 feet causing hazards for the city and county roadways.
Wapakoneta weather observer Dan Dietz calculated 8.5 inches of snow fell in Wapakoneta Friday and Saturday. The National Weather Service is predicting as much as 10 more inches starting with a light snow at midnight with most of the snow falling throughout the day Tuesday before tapering off early Wednesday morning.
Wapakoneta Public Works Superintendent Meril Simpson said city crews hit the roads at 4 a.m. Saturday, but the high winds hampered their effforts.
Crews worked until 4:15 p.m.. Saturday and returned Sunday and worked from 7 a.m. to 1p.m. before heading back out early this morning.
“We are attempting to clear the roadways the best we can and we are dumping more salt and grit this time,” Simpson said this morning. “The temperature is still too cold for the salt to work, but if we get enough sun it may warm it up enough to help.”
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Wednesday, 22 April 2009 |
By KAREN CAMPBELL
Assistant Managing Editor
Public hearings for a $20 proposed parcel fee charge for Auglaize County Solid Waste District Management services concluded Tuesday night.
Wanting the public throughout the county to be well informed, the Auglaize County Commissioners held six public hearings, instead of the required three, in numerous locations. Just a handful of residents, if any, showed up at most, while 26 attended a meeting Monday night in Uniopolis to ask questions.
Implementing the charge to raise more funds became necessary after a 2007 Ohio Supreme Court ruling against Auglaize County and the county’s Solid Waste Management District, which required the repayment of more than $2.06 million to the city of St. Marys, a result of the county not paying the annual monitoring costs for nearly a decade as a civil case moved through the court system. Attorneys for St. Marys filed the civil suit in May 2002.
In addition, the Supreme Court ruling made the county responsible for paying annual monitoring costs of the landfill estimated at approximately $105,000 a year for a minimum of 26 years.
The Solid Waste Management District also owes the county’s General Fund for money it borrowed to pay attorney costs during litigation. The district is paying back $40,000 a year for those costs during a 15-year period.
“The district must be in the positive and without creating an additional revenue stream, the budget is anticipated to be running in the negative by the end of the third quarter of 2009,” Commissioner Doug Spencer said. “This is solely due to the debt repayment and monitoring costs.”
The fee is expected to provide an anticipated $386,000 to the district annually.
Spencer said possible excesses in the operation were looked at, but any additional fine tuning to the annual district’s annual budget would not have bridged the gap.
Commissioners explored different avenues to raise funding, but they agreed the annual parcel fee seemed like the best choice, Spencer said.
“We were limited in our options,” Spencer said. “Generation fees bring in the bulk of money to the district, we could have doubled that or increased it and added a lower parcel fee, but we thought this was the best route.”
The $20 fee is per “improved parcel,” meaning it has at least one permanent, portable or temporary building, such as residences and dwellings, or commercial and industrial buildings, where solid waste is likely to be produced.
The fee does not apply if only agricultural buildings are on the parcel or if there are no buildings.
The fee is not per building, but charged once per qualifying parcel.
The district operates by collecting $9 per ton of waste in generation fees for delivering the waste to Ohio landfills.
An original 15-year plan established as required by the Ohio Environmental Program Agency, included a schedule for increasing the generation fees collected, starting with $10 in 2005, $11 in 2009 and $12 in 2015, but the schedule was never implemented.
“It was never necessary,” Solid Waste District Coordinator Dave Reichelderfer said. “With $9 we were able to carry an excess of funds until the Supreme Court ruling. We used up the excess doing that.”
In addition to the generation fee, the district receives revenue from the sale of recyclable material and has historically received grants from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.
More than 19,300 county parcels originally were planned to be assessed the solid waste fee but information that came from a question Tuesday lowered that number by approximately 1,000, once grain condos were subtracted.
Spencer said the parcel fee is not for General Fund purposes, other than to repay the debt, not for other special revenue funds, and not accessed every time a home improvement is made or apply to renovations made to dwellings or buildings.
The fee is expected to provide an anticipated $386,000 to the district annually.
Spencer said possible excesses in the operation were looked at, but any additional fine tuning to the annual district’s annual budget would not have bridged the gap.
Commissioners explored different avenues to raise funding, but they agreed the annual parcel fee seemed like the best choice, Spencer said.
“We were limited in our options,” Spencer said. “Generation fees bring in the bulk of money to the district, we could have doubled that or increased it and added a lower parcel fee, but we thought this was the best route.”
The $20 fee is per “improved parcel,” meaning it has at least one permanent, portable or temporary building, such as residences and dwellings, or commercial and industrial buildings, where solid waste is likely to be produced.
The fee does not apply if only agricultural buildings are on the parcel or if there are no buildings.
The fee is not per building, but charged once per qualifying parcel.
The district operates by collecting $9 per ton of waste in generation fees for delivering the waste to Ohio landfills.
An original 15-year plan established as required by the Ohio Environmental Program Agency, included a schedule for increasing the generation fees collected, starting with $10 in 2005, $11 in 2009 and $12 in 2015, but the schedule was never implemented.
“It was never necessary,” Solid Waste District Coordinator Dave Reichelderfer said. “With $9 we were able to carry an excess of funds until the Supreme Court ruling. We used up the excess doing that.”
In addition to the generation fee, the district receives revenue from the sale of recyclable material and has historically received grants from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.
More than 19,300 county parcels originally were planned to be assessed the solid waste fee but information that came from a question Tuesday lowered that number by approximately 1,000, once grain condos were subtracted.
Spencer said the parcel fee is not for General Fund purposes, other than to repay the debt, not for other special revenue funds, and not accessed every time a home improvement is made or apply to renovations made to dwellings or buildings.
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 23 April 2009 )
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