Fairfield council hears proposal for reopening compost site in 2025

FAIRFIELD – The Fairfield City Council heard a proposal from a private citizen to take responsibility for the city’s compost site so that it could reopen in 2025.

Austin Wilkinson lives just south of Fairfield and runs a company called Scar Grinding LLC. He’s ground brush at the city’s compost site on South 20th Street before, and now he’s offering to take it on as a personal project so the public can drop off brush or pick up free mulch once again.

Wilkinson said that, if the city would allow him to take on the compost site, he would like $34,200 per year from the city, which he said translates to $0.60 per month on a resident’s water bill.

The council listened to Wilkinson’s proposal during its meeting Monday, Dec. 16, and voted unanimously to refer the matter to the Environmental and Franchise Utilities Committee. Council members asked Wilkinson if he had floated his idea by Fairfield Street Superintendent Joe Hird, who had to close the compost site in August after it was being abused.

Hird, who was in attendance, took the microphone to say that he would love for Wilkinson to take over the compost site, as long as his department retained access to it to use when necessary, such as collecting brush after a storm.

Wilkinson told The Union that he has some ideas for combatting the abuse that plagued the compost site for years. For one, he plans to create a separate tree waste dumpsite for commercial users, who were officially banned from using the city’s compost site, though city officials said some contractors dumped there anyway.

“It will be a pay-per-load style,” Wilkinson said of his commercial tree waste dump. “I’ve talked to all the local contractors I can find, and they all agree that this would solve their problem of having no place to go. They’re not allowed to transport material away from any site and dispose of it by burning it.”

Wilkinson said there are few places in the area where contractors can take their tree waste, with the exception of the SEMCO landfill outside Richland.

“After you pay the dump fee and the time it takes to go to Richland and back, that’s driving the cost up for all citizens,” Wilkinson said. “If I solve [the contractors’] problem first, then I solve the problem in other places.”

Wilkinson said that, under his plan, he would be in charge of maintaining the city’s compost site, pushing brush into a pile and creating the mulch. The city would maintain the lease on the property.

“I’m proposing to turn it back into what it was, where there’s free access, anybody can come in and dump their [yard waste] when they need to, and they could load mulch themselves,” Wilkinson said. “What will be different is that if you have a larger load, over a pickup load, then you’ll have to set up an appointment.”

Wilkinson said he’d like to open the compost site one or two nights per week and maybe Saturday mornings.

In related news, the council heard from Fairfield resident Chris Sorflaten, who is also interested in reviving the compost site. Sorflaten proposed applying for an Environmental Protection Agency grant called the Solid Waste Infrastructure for Recycling Grant.

Sorflaten’s idea was to turn the city’s yard waste into biochar, where the waste is placed in a shipping container, set on fire, and then its lid is closed. This turns the yard waste into charcoal, which Sorflaten said is an effective way of sequestering carbon. He said the City of Des Moines has jumped on this idea, and is ordering two biochar reactors.

“It’s also one of the best ways to use fertilizer because it stays in the ground forever,” he said. “Native Americans burned the prairie for thousands of years, and that char went into the soil and made it really carbon-rich.”

Sorflaten also proposed combining his biochar idea with a new way to recycle the glass that Fairfield residents throw out, by turning it into “glass mulch” that can be used in landscaping. He said the City of Austin, Texas, does this with its glass.

Sorflaten was going to request $5 million from the EPA, and he told the council Monday night that the grant application was due on Thursday. Council members said this would require the Environmental and Utilities Franchise Committee to look at the matter right away, and then the council would have to convene again before Thursday. The council ultimately decided that such a turnaround was too quick, and tabled the grant application until next year.

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Call Andy Hallman at 641-575-0135 or email him at andy.hallman@southeastiowaunion.com