CATSKILL — The Greene County Legislature debated the possibility of returning to a six-day schedule for its Hunter transfer stations during its Public Works Committee meeting on Monday night.
Greene County Legislator Daryl Legg, D-Hunter, was the strongest advocate of expanding the hours.
The county has four transfer stations in operation, including Catskill, Coxsackie, Hunter and Windham, with each open five days per week.
The county set new hours of operation May 3, 2021, setting a five-day schedule for each station.
“What happened was that COVID hit and all of the transfer stations used to run six days per week,” Greene County Legislature Chairman Patrick Linger, R-New Baltimore, said following Monday’s meeting. “But they would use employees from facilities around the county who would move to a different facility at least one day a week and sometimes two days a week. When COVID hit, we didn’t want to mix employees in different facilities. So what we did was that we knocked everything down to five days and left everybody in their assigned facility.”
At a February legislature meeting, Legg asked Greene County Highway and Solid Waste Department Superintendent Scott Templeton if the county was considering moving the Hunter station back to six days per week. The issue was on the agenda during Monday’s committee meeting.
Greene County Legislator Thomas Hobart, R-Coxsackie, raised questions Monday about the staffing required to expand the station schedule to six days per week.
“What does that look like with manpower?” Hobart asked Templeton during Monday’s meeting.
“We would have to hire additional employees to staff that for the additional sixth day,” Templeton replied.
The superintendent noted that it would cost an estimated $200,000 per year to hire additional staff to return Hunter to a six-day per week schedule.
“It would require additional people to operate the station,” Templeton said.
“That was also to be incorporated with the other three stations possibly being open six days,” Legg noted.
Templeton replied that expanding staff would allow the Windham and Hunter to open six days per week, but not the Catskill and Coxsackie stations.
Legg said employees had previously volunteered to work overtime shifts to keep the Hunter station open six days per week.
Legg noted that in the current economic climate that workers might be open to overtime shifts for time-and-a-half pay.
Greene County Legislator Patricia Handel, R-Durham, expressed her skepticism during the meeting regarding the cost benefits of going back to a six-day schedule.
“So everybody else is open five days a week and Hunter wants six days at the cost of $200,000?” she asked. “I’m sorry, Daryl.”
Legg replied that it would cost $150,000 the first year and $100,000 the second to staff the station.
“It’s still insane,” Handel replied.
Legg said he was asking for all of the stations to expand their hours, not just Hunter.
“Catskill is open six days per week, five to the public and six for heavy haulers,” Legg said. “Hunter is a heavy-hauler station. So it would increase the amount of loads they could take there as well.”
“It just seems like a lot of money for a convenience,” Handel said during the meeting.
Greene County Administrator Shaun Groden noted during the meeting that the county’s overall waste and recycling operations currently run on a budget deficit.
Linger said the transfer stations are not receiving an overwhelming amount of trash now that the stations are open five days per week instead of six.
“I think people just remember seeing it was open six days per week and now it’s not,” he said after the meeting. “So they want to get back to that, but I don’t think that people really understand the whole story and what you’re required to do once you’re moving waste out of there. We used to bring all of the waste to Catskill. This saves us a lot of money by directly shipping from Hunter to Seneca Meadows. So we save a lot of coin that way.”
The committee meeting ended Monday without a resolution to the issue of expanding hours at the transfer stations.
“We’re shipping waste out of the Catskill facility, which we’ve always done, but we’re now shipping waste out of the Hunter facility,” Linger explained. “Coxsackie is about to be redone to do the same thing. So Daryl had the request to run a sixth day up in Hunter, but the operation has changed enough to where you can’t just stick one person in the booth and run a facility. Because you can’t have any waste now on the floor, it has to be emptied every day. So that means you have to hire additional people now to keep that floor clean to get a DEC permit.”