Fairfield council looking for solutions to compost site abuse

FAIRFIELD – The City of Fairfield is still looking for answers to the problem of tree contractors abusing its compost site.

The city maintains a compost site at the end of South 20 th Street beyond the Fairfield school district’s ACT Building. For more than a decade, residents could access the site seven days a week to drop off yard waste, limbs and grass clippings. The city put that yard waste through a tub grinder and turned it into mulch, which residents could take freely.

Though a sign at the entrance indicates the compost site is not for contractors, some used it anyway and dropped off whole trees or huge logs, some as wide as 4 feet. Fairfield City Administrator Doug Reinert said the logs are too big for the tub grinder, and the site was receiving more yard waste than it could process.

In response to this abuse of the site, the Fairfield City Council voted in October 2023 to limit access to it from 3 p.m. Friday until 7 a.m. Monday, so essentially just over the weekend, in the hopes that this would discourage contractors from using it during this time. However, at the most recent city council meeting on July 8, Reinert reported that abuse of the site has continued.

“Contractors are abusing it just as much as before,” he said. “We hire a company to come with a tub grinder, and they can only grind up to 10-12 inch logs. When you’ve got an entire tree, we have to pay to dump that somewhere else. Now we have enough mulch to last a few years. The compost site is for homeowners to bring tree limbs, not for tree contractors to dump trees.”

Reinert said operating the compost site has become a financial burden for the city, costing about $100,000 a year.

“This responsibility should not be put on the taxpayers and the city,” he said. “We can’t even transfer this stuff out to the landfill because they won’t accept it, either. We didn’t create this problem, but we’re trying to figure out how to solve it.”

Reinert said the city has identified at least three contractors who have illegally used the site, and that there were “many more” before the city made its push to limit access to contractors last year. He said he doesn’t believe any of those contractors have been issued a fine.

The council is mulling options about how to proceed, which could include installing cameras and creating a fine structure. It could also include finding an entrepreneur who might need all this extra wood and yard waste in their business.

“We’ve talked about putting up a guard station and paying employees to monitor what goes in and what goes out,” Reinert said. “But it could cost six figures to have it monitored.”

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