Residents say delayed landfill project reeks of mismanagement

BARNESVILLE, Ga. - A rural Georgia county’s plan to go green with its landfill has sparked a major backlash from upset taxpayers.

Lamar County’s solid waste authority has spent more than $20 million on a waste-to-fuel project that was originally supposed to be completed by November 2017. After multiple delays, the project still hasn’t launched, with machinery sitting idle and payments on a $27.5 million state loan starting in April, an investigation by the FOX 5 I-Team found.

"It’s so concerning that here we are, a county that allowed an authority to borrow all this money, and the county gets nothing for it," said Elaine Hallada, one of the leaders of the Concerned Citizens Group of Lamar County, whose members have been researching and speaking out publicly against the authority’s management of the project.

When the project was being conceived a decade ago, Johnny Poore, the Lamar County Regional Solid Waste Management Authority’s executive director, estimated it could bring in $2.8 million per year in revenue, according to a report in The (Barnesville) Herald-Gazette. He touted the project as a cutting-edge strategy to reduce space at the Cedar Grove Landfill, which could become a model for the whole state.

But so far, the county has yet to make a penny off the project as promised in the beginning – by reselling fuels and a byproduct that can be used in plastic or cement. Monthly loan payments of $106,000 will be covered in part through the solid waste authority’s contracts with landfill operator Amwaste, an attorney for the solid waste authority told FOX 5.

Asked why the project still hasn’t launched, Poore said it turned out to be way more complicated than he initially realized, requiring redesigns, re-engineering, re-permitting and even relocation.

The COVID pandemic also caused delays, Poore said. But the first phase of the project will start before New Year’s – evaporating leachate, or landfill rainwater runoff, to free up landfill space, the executive director said. The authority is waiting on its state Environmental Protection Division permit.

The pyrolysis phase – the process of cooking waste at high temperatures to produce fuels and char that can be used for a plastics filler – should begin next year, he said. Massive machinery set up in a building near the landfill must first be disassembled, transported and reassembled in the former Enercon building nearby, which the solid waste authority purchased in order to house the entire waste-to-fuel project in a single location.

"It’s going to be dependent on contracts, contractors," Poore said. "We’re shooting for next summer."

His assurances aren’t enough to satisfy the concerned citizens, though.

"I do not trust him," group member Dianne Perry said. "I don't think he's telling us the truth."

For years, no one made much fuss about the landfill project, even as it fell further and further behind its original schedule. Then Amwaste changed the rules earlier this year about drive-up dumping.

"We went to bring trash to the landfill and were turned away," Hallada said. "And it was like, what’s going on here?"

Hallada went to a commission meeting to complain and met other residents upset about the same thing. They formed the Concerned Citizens Group, a loose association of outraged citizens that has been filing open records requests, speaking out at meetings, writing letters to the local newspaper and gaining the support of at least two Lamar County commissioners.

"One question led to another, and we started looking into it, and we started finding out a lot of things that just didn’t seem right," said Mike Perry, Dianne’s husband and another Concerned Citizens Group founder.

"We’ve asked for a forensic audit of their books," Perry said. "(To) try to find out where the money has gone and why it went where it has gone."

The group wants the Board of Commissioners to vote on Dec. 19 for that audit. It’s not clear if that will work, though, because the attorney for the solid waste authority told the FOX 5 I-Team that the commission doesn’t have that kind of power over the authority, which operates independently.

Poore gave the I-Team a tour of the landfill and the former Enercon building, showing some of the products that can be made using the plastic filler he hopes to one day sell for a profit – such as golf cart brackets, ammunition holders and building materials.

"If we can take an environmental problem and solve it, and bless my community and bless my home and bless my people, we’ve done something," Poore said. "If we can solve that problem here – we, as a nation, as a community, as Georgia – we can solve that problem anywhere."

What the I-Team didn’t see on the tour, though, was any machinery operating.

The Georgia Environmental Finance Authority, which issued the $27.5 million loan, has granted the solid waste authority seven loan modifications over the years with extensions for finishing the project.

GEFA would not speak with FOX 5, but said in a written statement that the authority "is currently in compliance with its loan agreement for the waste-to-fuels project at the Cedar Grove landfill."