Me

Me

'balli

over fee

Proposed landfill review

charge marks new policy

By SHARON KILPATRICK

Rappahannock Newt Staff Writer

The state’s Department of Waste Management has proposed a set of new application fees for landfills that would cost the county $35,000 in spring or summer of 1992, an amount equal to one cent on the tax rate.

Last year’s General Assembly passed legislation giving the DWM authority to impose a fee schedule, but local officials and lawmakers understood that they would be processing fees, not fees set high enough to fund the department’s operation, County Administrator John McCarthy said.

“It would be like me imposing special use permit fees high enough to fund the zoning office,” Mr. McCarthy said. Special use permit fees cover the actual costs of the application, such as the costs of advertising and notifying neighboring landowners.

When Mr. McCarthy first received notice of the fee schedule from VACO, the Virginia Association of Counties, in October, he said he “went ballistic.”

He sent a reply to Larry Land, intergovernmental relations coordinator for VACO, saying that neither he nor the county argued with the need for new regulations for sanitary landfills but adding, “I had understood that the General Assembly and DWM had been partners in this process with localities; our lot to tax and spend to implement the new regulations and the Legislature’s to tax to fund the Department’s enforcement. Evidently my naivete knows few bounds, as the fiscal burden is intended to trickle down to the localities completely.”

He told the supervisors at their November meeting that the localities had been promised no new mandates in this time of fiscal problems for the state, “but they’re passing on the cost of operating one state agency to the localities.”

The supervisors applauded Mr. McCarthy’s opposition to the new fees and asked him also to write to Rappahannock’s representatives and the Boards of Supervisors

See FEE, p. A-8