Basin residents expressed frustration with a recent county decision to open their local dump only one day a week this summer, halving its opening hours from previous summers.
“Basin’s again getting treated like a red-headed stepchild,” said resident DeDe Rhodes, whose husband Richard Rhodes is running for Jefferson County Commissioner. DeDe added that Basin’s dump had already been the only county landfill open just one day a week in winter.
Now that schedule is year-round, while Whitehall’s dump is open four days weekly year-round, and Montana City’s seven days a week. In Basin, the shift from two days weekly in summer to one is expected to reduce the community’s ability to dispose of its waste.
“This is ridiculous!” Basin resident Judi Colombe, a server at the Silver Saddle bar, said on Facebook, responding to a post on the dump discussion. “Why would they do something like this?”
County Commissioner Cory Kirsch responded to the Facebook posts, saying the county had good reason for the decision. He told The Monitor the move was about cost and efficiency.
“The statistics on the amount of garbage we got on Tuesdays was almost nil,” he said. “We’ve got five other sites around the county and we have trouble staffing them all. We decided it would be easier to leave Basin only open on Sundays.”
The Basin schedule change was approved at the February 10 Jefferson County Solid Waste meeting. Some residents complained on Facebook of not being informed of the move. Kirsch apologized for that oversight, citing a miscommunication with Solid Waste officials.
Other residents wondered why the loss of a full day of dump access would not result in a reduced annual fee. This is because all county residents seeking to use county dumps (in Montana City, Clancy, Jefferson City, Boulder, Basin, or Whitehall) pay an annual $193 fee for a permit that grants access to all six sites.
Kirsch pointed out that the Boulder dump is open three days per week, Monday, Thursday and Saturday, and could offer Basin residents an alternative.
“They’re close enough to Boulder that they could drive to Boulder to make a dump,” he said, adding that a lot of residents in western and southern Jefferson County have to drive further to use a site.
“The site in Basin is pure convenience, it’s not actually needed,” said Kirsch. “I advocate for keeping it open as I live in Basin. But that is the least used site in the county.”
