Council members pressed county officials on Dec. 30 about long lines backing up from the transfer station and whether staffing and accounting need changes to address traffic and financial oversight.

Council members said vehicles were lining up and requested additional part-time staff to keep the site moving. Officials said the bottleneck is the requirement that all vehicles cross the scale and that adding staff alone would not clear the scale constraint. The transfer station is currently open limited hours (described as about 28 hours per week) and staffing proposals included adding one advertised part-time position or creating PRN (on-call) positions.

Council members also raised accounting concerns: some credit-card receipts from the transfer station are being deposited into a separate bank account set up by staff, rather than being posted to the official transfer-station fund. Staff said cash receipts are flowing to the fund but credit-card receipts were routed to the separate account and had not yet been moved into the fund; the treasurer knows the balances but regular reconciliations and clearer reporting were requested. One official said the 2025 appropriation for the transfer station was $177,800 while reported expenditures had reached about $310,483, prompting questions about whether the facility can stand on its own in 2026 without county subsidies.

IDE M compliance also figured in the discussion: staff said employees at the transfer station must be trained and meet IDEM operating-plan and emergency-response requirements, and that onboarding has a cost.

On staffing, staff and council discussed an advertised salary-ordinance change for one additional part-time employee and options to add PRN/1099 personnel; participants agreed to return to the salary-ordinance item for formal action and to seek treasury/accounting reports to reconcile receipts.

What to watch: accounting reconciliations of credit-card receipts into the transfer-station fund, the decision on part-time vs. PRN staffing, and whether scale operations or pricing tweaks will be used to reduce lineups.