Talking trash
To the editor:
In last week’s edition of the Marion County Record, in the 30 years ago Memories, was an item about an introductory proposal by Browning Ferris Industries to buy the Marion County Landfill.
The item says that it was a possible solution to solid-waste disposal for the four counties that made up the Central Kansas Solid Waste Authority, a group representing Marion,
Dickenson, McPherson and Harvey counties.
I was a member of the Solid Waste Authority, representing Marion County. My being a representative was in part having experience developing and installing a new hazardous medical waste incinerator and removing a leaking buried diesel fuel tank as part of my job as plant operations supervisor for St. Luke Hospital.
Members of the authority quickly knew that BFI was not going to buy and develop a landfill just for the four counties but really was seeking a solution to Wichita and Sedgwick County’s solid-waste problem as their large, outdated landfill was slated to be closed.
There was no appetite for siting a landfill in Sedgwick County, so BFI started trying to site landfills in surrounding counties with little success.
For the next two years, the issue advanced with the support of two commissioners and the editor of the Marion County Record while one commissioner, Linda Peterson, and the editor of the Hillsboro Star-Journal opposed the mega-landfill development.
Marion County had just put in place a planning commission tasked with making land-use decisions, which made the landfill development subject to approval and the issuance of a conditional-use permit.
The Concerned Citizens of Marion County was formed to oppose the landfill based on the environmental damage the project would cause, the increased traffic on county roads by large trash trucks, the impact to the residents living around the proposed landfill and the long-term expense and problems future generations would have to deal with.
In 1997, a hearing before the Marion County Planning Commission was scheduled for BFI to request a permit to develop the landfill.
BFI made a general argument for the proposal that seemed to be a “one size fits all” approach that probably was used every time it went before a group of planners.
The CCMC, on the other hand, had 40 speakers in opposition to the proposal with detailed maps, statistics, a slide show, and heartfelt expressions of love for the community and land.
At the end of the meeting, it was pretty obvious that BFI could not prevail. In a couple of months, its application was withdrawn, but the quest for a landfill in Marion County would persist for another two years.
Had the BFI mega-landfill been built and operated with at least 2,000 tons per day of solid waste (a low-ball estimate), there would be at least 15 million tons of waste out there near Aulne, in the watershed of Spring Branch Creek, which feeds into the Cottonwood River.
That mountain of waste containing tons and tons of plastics would be the legacy and responsibility of all the future Marion County residents forever.
Harry E. Bennett
Madison, Wisconsin
Editor’s note — The writer seems to want to take credit for preventing a landfill from locating in Marion County.
One wonders whether he also wants to take credit for:
- the $125-a-year fee each landowner in the county now must pay,
- the additional $8.50 a month that Marion households must pay, and
- the millions of dollars that would have been available for street and road repair and other public infrastructure
that a subsequent, much safer plan to locate a landfill in the former quarry north of US-56 and Timber Rd. would have provided.
That doesn’t include the current and potential cost the county faces of having to monitor and perhaps someday clean up its old landfill and the massive cost of building, equipping, and staffing a county transfer station that wouldn’t have been needed.
A handful of alarmist, “not in my backyard” tree-huggers cost Marion residents at least $6,810 plus much higher taxes and lower levels of government service.
Local governments now must pay “tipping fees” for waste disposal elsewhere instead of earning such fees for allowing disposal in a safe, well-regulated landfill here that would have restored land damaged by quarrying and provided local jobs.
If you look back at local history and attempt to chart when things began going off the rails, opposition to landfill plans stands out. Those of us still living in the county now must pay — and pay dearly — for that short-sighted opposition.
Last modified Oct. 15, 2025