Should Trail’s McKelvey Creek landfill be operated entirely by the Regional District of Kootenay Boundary?
That’s one of the things to be studied as part of a solid waste management plan that the RDKB awarded a contract for last week.
At the moment, McKelvey Creek has a mix of staff: RDKB employees are the front-line folks you see when driving across the scales, but contractors do the behind-the-scenes work of compacting, moving waste around, and hauling to other facilities.
In the Boundary, however, the RDKB’s transfer stations and landfills are staffed exclusively with regional district staff.
“That will be one of the considerations in the solid waste plan,” chief administrator Mark Andison said. “Do we continue with [the current] model or move toward the model we’ve adopted in the Boundary?”
Switching to in-house staffing would mean capital costs of $3 million to $5 million because the RDKB would have to buy its own compacters and excavators. However, Andison said it has proved cost-effective in the Boundary.
Any change would be years away. The overall waste plan is expected to take 18 to 24 months to create, and then receiving provincial approval could take up to two years.
The $117,000 contract to create the overall plan, awarded to Sperling Hansen Associates of North Vancouver, was within the budgeted $200,000, the RDKB board was told. However, it’s possible the cost could go higher as the project proceeds.
The RDKB’s current solid waste plan was created in 2006.
