Heated Solid Waste Authority Discussions at County Commission Meeting

Gail Siers and Darrell Roach, two Pocahontas County Solid Waste Authority (SWA) board members who were appointed by the County Commissioners to that board, were asked to appear before the County Commissioners at the November 4^th Pocahontas County Commission meeting. Commission President John Rebinski explained that the commission has recently learned that they have the authority to unappoint the SWA members that they had appointed if it feels they are not doing their jobs and he said the commission is concerned with all the controversy that is happening on the SWA Board.

Siers said he had thought they were invited just to provide an update on what the SWA board is doing. He said they are moving forward with straightening out the solid waste problems they inherited. He talked about the 30 unremedied violations found by the WV Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) at the landfill since December of 2025, for which the SWA is being fined $72,000. He said the SWA hopes to negotiate that fine down.

When asked if they were still considering a transfer station for when the landfill closes, Siers said that while they have not entirely ruled that out, if they do build one it will be a lot less costly than the original transfer station planned by the old SWA board.  He said according to their engineer firm, they now have 15 months of landfill life left, but they hope to increase that by possibly adding a new cell or two to the landfill, however, it is getting harder to get the permits to do that. Commissioner Jamie Walker, who three years ago was a member of the SWA board, said a new one-acre cell would cost around a million dollars and only add 2 years of life to the landfill.

Siers said they have saved more than $700 a month by contracting with a Beckley company who now parks a recyclable metals trailer at the landfill and, when it is full, hauls it away at no cost to the SWA, sells the metal, and pays some of that money back to the SWA. He said the old board was paying $700 just to have each trailer load of metals hauled away.

Some of the commissioners expressed concerns from the public that the new board members have hired a new Secretary for $17.00 per hour and a new Administrative Secretary for $27.00 an hour, which is a lot more than the former SWA office staff was paid, and even more than Deputy County Clerks are paid.

Commissioner Jamie Walker said the public in general expected to see real results with the new members, but are not seeing any. Commissioners Thane Ryder and Rebinski said that before being appointed to the SWA board the new members had loudly criticized the old board for raising the green box fees to where many people could not afford them, but now that they are able to do so, these new members have not lowered those fees.

Jacob Meck of Allegheny Disposal also addressed the commissioners and said the new board is not following or taking steps to change the five-year Siting and Solid Waste Control Plan which the old board had submitted and was approved by the state Solid Waste Management Board. That plan declares that landfill closed in September and it approved his plan to build a transfer Station for the SWA at the county landfill. Mack said that the landfill is now so full it is dangerous for his trucks to drive into and unload trash there. He also pointed out that currently there is no licensed Landfill Manager there since the SWA fired Chris McComb at their October meeting. Meck said that by the old board raising the green box fee to $260 a year, that would have covered cost of his transfer station lease and of the trash hauling for the last 6 months of this year and by raising it to $310 next year, it would have covered those expenses for that full year as well. He added that now with the new SWA terminating their contract with his company, the public gets nothing for those increased fees. He this has also caused his company to have to build its own transloading station on its own property in order to serve their own customers because they can no longer count on the SWA. He said the SWA also still owes him many thousands of dollars per the letter of intent they signed with him when they agreed for him to build the transfer station.

Chris McComb said he was unfairly fired as the Landfill Manager by the new board members for not fixing the violations found by the DEP at the landfill, yet they never gave him the resources to fix those problems. He said he still did his best to fix them, but without adequate resources and staff, the issues kept reoccurring, and that since the DEP inspectors are paid to find problems, they always do. McComb added that his two employees who worked on the landfill face have quit because they were only making $13.50 per hour but the SWA is now hiring new workers at a much higher rate of pay, including truck drivers for $20.00 per hour. He said the new SWA members will end up costing the residents a lot more money than Meck’s transfer station would have over 15 years and that things “are bad and it’s gonna get worse.” He said the SWA was wrong to fire him because he did his job as well as possible with the limited resources provided to him and worked long hours without charging the SWA overtime.

Be sure to listen to the second part of this story where we will tell you about the rest of this meeting.