The construction of Peoria County's third landfill is back on track, even if it is coming later than anyone expected.
But if you ask any member of the deliberation group who hammered out the latest agreement on Landfill Three, the end was nowhere in sight just a few short months ago.
“Actually, Matt [Coulter] and I just started meeting for breakfast, coffee and just sort of talking through the agreement,” said Sharon Williams, Peoria County Board vice chair and liaison to the Peoria City/County Landfill Commission.
Williams explained the beginning of the talks at a roundtable hosted by WCBU, including Peoria County Board Chairman Jimmy Dillon, Peoria City Manager Patrick Urich and GFL Environmental Regional Vice President Matt Coulter.
GFL Environmental is the company that inherited an earlier agreement to build and operate Landfill 3 when it purchased the Peoria Disposal Company.
There’s a lot of incentives in the new agreement for the city and county. Coulter says that comes from a desire to maintain relationships.
“I think that’s why we came back to the table and cooler heads did prevail,” said Coulter. “And we started negotiating back on what was agreed to, even with PDC, so it was the right thing to do.”
The relationship was strained prior to these talks, as confusion about permits, a previous request for delays, and compounding environmental issues led to the brink of breach of contract litigation. County Board Chair Jimmy Dillon says it took some time to come back from that ledge.
“This is my take on how we got to here, is that, we got the lawyers out of the room and we actually sat down as individuals and people and started talking about what is...originally, there’s always a winner and loser in deals and originally that’s how everybody felt about the deal,” he said.
So what had to happen to make everyone come away feeling like a winner, even when the county and city reversed their previously firmly held position that the construction would not be delayed?
For Peoria, City Manager Patrick Urich says getting rid of incremental increases in garbage disposal rates for residents carries some weight.
“Basically, the contract calls for inflationary increases,” he said. “So if you think about it, that means we’ll be paying, in today’s dollars, the same amount 30, 40 years from now for our waste, just growing by the rate of inflation. So that’s a nice, nice position to be in for the city.”
On top of that, Urich says the agreement does away with an annual 6% increase in landfill costs the city currently takes on. He says it amounts to about $1.5 million saved a year, a number that's been touted frequently since the new agreement was inked.
GFL Regional Vice President Coulter says the contract is unique in the industry.
“Kudos, again, to the city and the county to realize that this contract is unlike any other I think, probably, in the United States,” he said. “They have guaranteed landfill pricing for at least the next 40 years under this new, negotiated contract.”
On the county side, locked-in rates also played a role in getting a new negotiation done. Specifically, Williams says she was concerned with a lack of positives in the previous agreement for residents of the county's unincorporated areas.
Now, it includes a standardized disposal rate for those areas.
“We had to figure out something, we had to take the garbage somewhere and we just didn’t have, we didn’t have anything in place to say where the garbage was going to go,” said Williams.
Now, we do know where the garbage is going to go. The Waste Management-run Landfill 2 is set to be full by the first quarter of 2025. Coulter says G-F-L will haul garbage to the Hopedale area's Indian Creek Landfill until a transfer station can be built on a plot of land near Pottstown.
Coulter says that land comes from a 1990s siting his family undertook back when they owned Peoria Disposal Company, which was bought out by G-F-L in 20-21.
“Then, we just never built it,” said Coulter. “So we kept the permit active and updated.”
Coulter expects the transfer station construction to be finished and the site to be operational in early 2026. He expects the community to be pleased with the ease of use a transfer station can provide.
“Once they start using a local transfer station to dispose of their waste and to get rid of everything they have, they’re going to be shocked by how nice it is,” he said. “And they’re never, never going to want to use the landfill again, in my opinion.”
At the end of it all, Board Chair Dillon says that it took less than a month of these deliberate talks to get the new agreement in place.
“It went from, basically, a complete reversal of wanting to say ‘you’re building it now,’ to ‘hey, this is a win-win for all sides in this situation,’ and making something good out of a situation nobody foresaw in the past,” he said.
Incentives for the city and county — and more time for the operators to build a new landfill — ultimately helped work out a plan for Peoria County's trash for the decades to come.
