By SHAWN STREET
shawn@virginiamediainc.com
Trash sites and funding for the school system were among the main topics of discussion during the June 24 budget meeting of the Russell County Board of Supervisors.
At the beginning of the nearly two-hour meeting, Russell County Administrator Lonzo Lester presented the board with a balanced budget of $35,130,893. “It is balanced. It is fair,” Lester said.
He added that the county currently has a surplus of approximately $150,000. That number of significant, Lester said, because neighboring counties have found themselves millions of dollars in debt.
Lester said one of the biggest areas of concern was the price of inflation. He said the county’s fuel bill alone has ballooned to $14,000 a month.
Board members began discussing areas that could be cut to produce more savings. As has been the case in recent meetings, trash became a major topic.
Chairman David Eaton introduced a proposal to close the Drill and Blackford sites while opening a new manned site at Putnam.
Eaton made the argument that simply closing unmanned sites for the sake of saving money would prove to be a major inconvenience to residents and could lead to environmental headaches.
“I’m concerned about the alternative problems we would face,” Eaton said. He added that some residents would be looking at “30-40 minutes in a car” to dump their trash.
“I don’t want an environment of trash all over,” he said. ‘I’m afraid that’s what you’ll see. People will just throw it out.”
District 3’s Tara Dye agreed. She said closing the sites would inconvenience a lot of people, especially the elderly. “These convenient sites are not as convenient as some of y’all would like to think,” she said.
Speaking of the Finney site, Dye went on to say, “My district is the biggest by land, so it does create more of an inconvenience for my people. Closing it right now would be horrible. You don’t just close it and inconvenience all those people.”
District 5 representative Steve Breeding said people getting rid of their household trash was nothing more than “a matter of scheduling.” He added that it was not fair to ask members of his district to use their tax dollars to keep a dump site open elsewhere.
“It is not fair to ask them to pay their share to keep that site open over there,” Breeding said.
Lou Wallace, of District 2, said a major step to solving the county’s trash problem was to close the unmanned sites. “The first step is to close what we have,” Wallace said. “It is not fair to leave some open and close others. If a motion arises, I’m voting to close them.”
As for Dye and Eaton’s points about inconvenience, Wallace added, “A lot of people choose to live on a mountain top or in a holler. But you have got to figure out how to get your garbage from Point A to Point B.”
After taking a short break, the meeting resumed with concerns facing the school system.
Finance Director Brooke Webb said lack of matching dollars from the county could cost the school system greatly in state funding. “It looks like, to me, I’m going to lose $5.6 million,” Webb said.
Webb said cutting programs and layoffs would result.
After crunching the numbers, Lester determined the county and the school system were off by $1.2 million.
The board agreed to study the budget in detail and reconvene on June 29.