The Household Hazardous Waste Facility in Hutchinson will have additional weekend hours starting Aug. 5. The update is meant to help shore up the removal of McLeod County’s rural recycling drop sites.
“This is a way that we can hopefully start to build back and focus on one facility with more community outreach and education,” Environmental Services Director Marc Telecky told the County Board this past week.
The facility will be open from 8 a.m. to noon for recycling to be dropped off on the first Saturday of each month, with consideration given to holidays. The schedule set out in a unanimous resolution included Aug. 5, Sept. 9 due to Labor Day, Oct. 7, Nov. 4 and Dec. 2 this year. Additional Saturdays will continue through July this year, with participation tracked to allow the county to evaluate the program’s success.
Approval for the Saturday hours followed the board’s unanimous decision to remove rural recycling drop sites. The county will also consider the option of building back a reduced number of sites “with consideration to monitoring, improved infrastructure, limited access and on-site information,” Telecky said.
The county has worked with townships in recent years to maintain the drop-off sites, but an ongoing pattern of what has been described as “abuse” failed to abate. Board Chairman Paul Wright did not mince words regarding his frustration during last week’s County Boad meeting.
“When we rolled out single-sort (recycling), the residents in the cities were able to have their own container. In order to access the rural areas, we resorted to more dumpsters, or large containers,” he said. “It’s kind of a sad deal, because there are a lot of people out there that really want them. They’re using them for the right reasons. They’re cleaning up the recycling. They want to have that opportunity. But then there are the other ones, which are to this point overtaking the majority of the space in those dumpsters with their just absolutely deliberate abuse.
“It’s really sad to open up the doors and see anywhere from vacuum cleaners, to lamps, to furniture, to TVs, gross household garbage. I believe it was this spring, somebody worked hard enough to roll off a piano at one of our sites. That’s obviously not recyclable.”
Wright said that if he had his way, he “would put up a lot of cameras, and we’d put the faces and license plates of everybody that’s abusing those sites on our social media feed.”
He said he hoped the county could come up with a permanent solution down the road.
“This is the only county in the 87 counties that doesn’t charge,” said Board member Doug Krueger. “Going forward, everything is on the table. ... This may end the free part if we have to do this much work cleaning it up.”
The county spent $160,000 each year maintaining the rural sites. Telecky said that if the hours of environmental services staff, highway department staff, and the Sentencing to Service crew that have had to help clean the sites were added up, the cost would be much higher.
In addition to the drop-off site in Hutchinson, residential recycling services will continue as well.
