Rumpke of Kentucky employee Steve Bartlett collects residential trash Wednesday on Lost Circle. Photo by Joe Imel

Bowling Greens trash is Warren Countys treasure, according to City Commission candidate Brian Slim Nash. Nash claims Warren County Fiscal Court is profiting from its agreement to handle Bowling Greens garbage collection. He says that a five-year agreement between Fiscal Court and Rumpke of Kentucky that took effect Aug. 1 will pour more than $24,000 a month into county coffers money the city could be collecting if it had not given up the operation. Those involved in deciding to hand over the citys waste-management operations in the early 1990s say Fiscal Court spends much of the franchise fee to carry out the program. Nash is one of seven candidates vying for four at-large City Commission seats in Tuesdays election. One of the things I will do if elected is ask the city attorneys to look at the statute what loops the city would have to jump through to get that ball back in our court and therefore reap the rewards, Nash said. This is money that should be going to benefit the citys taxpayers. We need to be getting all the Is dotted and the Ts crossed so that we can get that decision transferred back to the city. But Bill Hays, the citys public works director from 1986 to 1999, said he strongly recommended that the city get out of waste management because increased expenses following the states landmark 1990 decision requiring stricter landfill regulations were draining city resources. Like Bowling Green, most of the states second-class cities made similar changes. Fiscal Court signed a five-year city garbage collection agreement with Monarch Environmental in 1995. Rumpke snatched the contract away from Monarch in recent bidding and will be responsible for city garbage collection through July 2005. The result has been a 30 percent drop in costs, which has lowered residents fees by more than $4 a month. Nash has misrepresented the situation, said Stan Reagan, the countys Community Services coordinator. In 1991, Bowling Green under Mayor Patsy Sloan decided it would go under this plan, Reagan said. At that time, the city was losing over $300,000 a year in waste management. Longtime City Manager Charles Coates disputed Nashs claim that the city was losing money and opening itself to increased liability simply because it was using its own work force. We never had our own workforce doing waste-management, Coates said. Instead, the countys handling of the matter has been a win-win deal for everyone involved: Residents rates are lower and the city is making $90,000 a year by leasing out its Preston Street transfer station, he said. Landfill expenses especially the cost of closing them is seen as the reason behind the citys decision to hand waste management to the county. Around $6 million was spent to close city-owned landfills in Butler County and on Glen Lily Road. The city decided to get out of it, Hays said. For the city to have remained a solid-waste provider, it would have had to produce a complete solid-waste plan, and it just wasnt the best way to go. Workers liability also factored in the citys decision, Hays said, disputing Nashs claim that the county has no liability because it contracts the work out in a hands-off approach. But it isnt just who hauls it there, its under controlling authority, Hays said of liability. The city was becoming exposed more and more to liability and wanted the county to take it off our hands.