Pa. county turns to neighboring one for help to get landfill back to profitability

WILLIAMSPORT — Lycoming County is turning to a neighboring county for advice on how to again make its landfill profitable.

The county commissioners on Thursday approved a two-year agreement with the Clinton County Solid Waste Authority that operates the Wayne Twp. landfill near McElhattan.

The authority will be paid $20,000 monthly to provide management services and advice. The county will no longer have a resource management director.

The landfill, which serves part or all of nine counties, is $27 million in debt due to bond issues, and it does not have sufficient life remaining without expanding to generate the revenue to pay them off, the commissioners say.

At the current rate waste is received — a daily average of 1,044 tons in 2024 — the landfill will be filled in eight years, Commissioner Marc C. Sortman said.

“The scary thing is if the county cannot get a permit to expand, we could be done in eight years,” he said. “I don’t know where the garbage would go.”

The county in 2023 paid the U.S. General Services Agency $6.5 million for 1,067 adjacent acres that included the former Allenwood Federal Prison Camp to provide for landfill expansion.

Jay Alexander, general manager of the Clinton County Solid Waste Authority, said his team on Monday will begin looking at getting a permit from the Department of Environmental Protection to expand the Lycoming landfill.

That process, which includes groundwater monitoring, can take five years, he pointed out.

The commissioners, about a year ago, made it known publicly that the landfill along Route 15 in the Montgomery area no longer was profitable to operate.

The general assumption until then was that the operation was self-sufficient.

According to records, the landfill made its first profit — $3.3 million — in 1987, nine years after it opened. Revenue exceeded expenses by approximately $5 million annually in the 1990s.

But according to the commissioners, it has operated at a cash deficit for the past 10 years.

Mya D. Toon, who is retiring as the county’s director of financial management, offered two viable options: hire a management consulting firm or sell the landfill and “cut our losses.”

The commissioners chose the management consulting firm option. Sortman said he first met with officials from the Keystone Sanitary Landfill in Lackawanna County and then with Alexander to get their thoughts on “what we are doing wrong.”

The county will continue to own the landfill, hire the employees and set the rates, he said.

Rates were raised 4 percent or $2.50 a ton last year. It was the first increase since 2009.

The resource management operation made $1.27 million in 2024 by selling power from its cogeneration plant, including $478,306 from the U.S. Bureau of Prisons for its Allenwood complex.

The landfill serves all or parts of Lycoming, Union, Snyder, Montour, Columbia, Perry, Luzerne, Mifflin, Juniata and Northumberland counties.

It also has a recycling operation and a transfer station in Williamsport.

Alexander is familiar with the Lycoming County facility because his late father, Wayne, ran it for years. Sortman cited that legacy.