Residents of rural Echo will soon have their very own recycling container. With another receptacle already in place in neighboring Wood Lake, is it necessary?
In a 4-1 vote, Yellow Medicine County Commissioners ap-proved the purchase of the rural Echo container along with an additional spare bin contingent upon it reducing transportation costs associated with providing the service. Four members of the Echo Township board were present at the meeting to make the request on behalf of the local community.
Last year the commissioners approved the purchase of four $7,200 county recycling repositories, which were placed in Granite Falls, Clarkfield, Wood Lake and Canby. The service was established to provide rural residents, who are not offered curbside pick-up, a nearby location to leave their recycling.
According to commissioners, the containers have received substantial use and early problems involving non-recyclables placed in the bins have subsided. At present, Clarkfield, Canby and Granite Falls have the container unloaded once per week, while Wood Lake has it dumped every other week
The lone dissenting vote to commissioner Ron Antony’s motion came from board member Gary Johnson.
“I don’t know if we can afford to keep expanding something like this,” stated Johnson.
Johnson pointed out that Echo was only seven miles from Wood Lake and questioned whether the commissioners should establish guidelines indicating how many of the containers the county should have in total as well as where they should be placed within the county.
Antony said that Yellow Medicine needs to stay up with the state requirement that 60 percent of the county’s total waste be recycled, and that he’d like to see two or three more receptacles put place in over the next few years as budgets provide.
At present, county administrator Ryan Krosch said the recycling fund has $19,238 available. The fund is replenished by a yearly $10 per parcel assessment and matching 'Select Committee On Recycling and the Environment' (SCORE) grant. In addition the county also receives dollars for recyclables taken to the landfill.
Other news:
•The food shelf is “busier than it has ever been” and Family Services is no longer equipped to handle all of the traffic on its own, according to YMC Family Services Director Peggy Heglund.
Heglund said that the amount of food is not the issue, instead it was the logistics involved with the unloading of trucks, the handing out of food and the associated paper work.
Heglund said that the county could consider a number of options to remedy the problem, one of which would be to hire a coordinator at an estimated cost of $5,000 per year.
•Commissioner Gary Johnson was the lone dissenter in a vote to waive a 30-day comment period and approve a request by the Canby Housing and Redevelopment Authority (HRA) to create of a Tax Increment Financing (TIF) district in the city.
According to commissioners, the TIF district is needed to make Outland Renewable Energy eligible to receive a redevelopment grant that will assist the business in establishing an office building that will employ 20 in city limits.
Commissioners said that the timing of the request gave them only six days as opposed to the 30 required by statute. Johnson said he wasn’t against the TIF district, only the process because it is the “third or fourth” time that HRA of Canby has had to ask for a waiver.
Yellow Medicine County —
