In April 2009, Town Meeting approved $185,000 for an excavator at the transfer station. You might not remember approving this because it was not presented as a separate warrant article. It was included in article 7, the NESWC, or transfer station budget. AKA the town reserve fund.
This excavator may not be purchased as soon as FY 2010 starts in July, because all capital is on hold. But it is approved and will probably be acquired soon.
This item is supposedly needed to go with the $300,000 wood chipper the town purchased in FY2009. Together, this dynamic duo is supposed to supply mulch for the town and compost for playing fields.
Added together we have $485,000 in capital, plus unknown amounts of town labor over the years it takes to turn wood chips into compost. While you are waiting for the compost to cook, you can take home some of the mulch for your yard. It is just like the mulch at the entrance to the transfer station.
What? You wouldn’t put mulch from diseased trees in your yard? But insects need a home too! Oh, well. We will just wait for the mulch to cook into beautiful, soft compost.
This enterprise is supposed to save the town the cost of fertilizer and be a more green solution. Is the difference in cost between chemical fertilizer and organic fertilizer that great that it justifies this expense? Would purchased organic fertilizer require turning every few weeks as our mulch pile does?
The answer to both questions in no. Chemical fertilizers are actually becoming more and more expensive. Organic fertilizer is becoming more popular, more available and less expensive.
With compost selling, in bulk, for about $20 per cubic yard, $485,000 will buy you 24,000 cubic yards of compost. This is enough to cover a football field to a depth of over 13 feet. Assuming ¼ inch application, this would supply over 600 applications.
Where is the cost savings? How much was the town spending on chemical fertilizers before this enterprise started? How many dollars of labor need to be added to this equation? How much other organic material needs to be added to properly compost these wood chips? What value does wood chipping provide to the taxpayers? What is the risk to the capped landfill?
The wood chipping explanation was the only one given pre town meeting. Are there any others? If this capital item was discussed on its own at town meeting, we might know these answers. But these, like so many other questions go unanswered. The question is moved, the money is spent and on we go.
The use of the NESWC fund to make questionable, expensive purchases for the transfer station, and other departments, is very tempting. This is because the millions of dollars of town reserves is sitting in there and burning a hole in someone’s pocket.
The mulch enterprise becomes another sponge to absorb capital and labor costs for questionable returns. In a few years this will become a perfect business school case study of how not to save money.
There are so many other more important items in the municipal and public school budgets and they are in danger because of local revenue shortfalls and state aid reductions.
If you go to special town meeting in June and hear that something is being cut or a fee is being raised and that upsets you, just think about the beautiful calming mulch pile on Transfer Station Mountain.
