In Tuesday’s fiscal court meeting, county attorney Tom Noe informed the court he had received word from Bud Strickler, attorney for the Anderson family, negotiations had taken a turn concerning the landfill.

The Anderson family leases the property the landfill is located on to Waste Management and that lease ends in 2015. Noe said Strickler told him Waste Management had received a “serious proposal” from the Anderson camp recently and both sides were talking again.

Negotiations have been on-going the past five years between the Andersons and Waste Management in attempts to extend the lease possibly 15 to 20 more years; however, those talks hit a wall and Waste Management came to believe a “deal” would not be reached and they would have to close down the landfill by 2015.

Because the landfill is only half full, Waste Management devised a plan B consisting of asking the county if they could bring in more waste and fill up early. The landfill currently has 1.75 million cubic yards left in air space, which means the volume of waste it can hold.

Waste Management's legal representative Bob Leiniger attended a previous court meeting asking the county to do just that, which would require an amendment to the host agreement between the county and Waste Management. The current agreement allows 1,150 tons of waste into the landfill per day, Waste Management would like to double that amount and “fill up” the landfill by 2015 paying the county $1.8 million dollars to do so. Waste Management threw this same deal out on the table last year but nothing concrete was ever settled on. The most that happened was magistrates asked the citizens of Logan County to chime in on what they thought.

The county’s host agreement with Waste Management gives them control over how much goes into the landfill on a daily basis. The county generated over $200,000 a year from the landfill. Those amounts include the county’s collecting $500 annually from other waste haulers who come into the county to dump in the landfill.

At the time Leiniger came to a court meeting last month he had told magistrates negotiations with the Andersons were going no where and it was anticipated would not. Magistrates wanted to give the negotiation process a little more time and even offered to act as a mediator between the two. Members of the court expressed concern about allowing the host agreement to change and the amount of trucks a change would put traveling on Logan County’s roads. Most of the waste hauled to the Landfill comes from out of state, in particular the Nashville area.