For more than 20 years, Madison and Dane County worked together to provide something local gardeners adore: cheap compost.
Each year, city crews collected batches of leaves that residents raked into the parkways and curbs and delivered them to county parks. County workers rotated and managed the compost piles and ran the material through screens to remove trash. They made the finished compost available to the public – home gardeners and developers alike. The program kept the leaves out of the lakes and the landfill, and turned them into valuable garden nutrients or landscape material for new housing developments.
Madison-area residents could buy the low-cost compost at sites in Verona and Westport. On many Saturday mornings in May, residents lined up waiting to fill trailers, trucks or even hatchbacks with compost. An entire pickup truck load ran just $10.
But last year, Dane County announced it would be closing the compost sites after losing its main customer, the city of Madison.
George Dreckmann, recycling coordinator for Madison, says the city withdrew from the program after fees skyrocketed. “The county increased our annual fee from $51,000 a year to $250,000 a year,” he says. “So faced with that increase, we looked to see if there might be alternatives that cost less.”
The city will still pick up leaves from the curbside and pay to compost them. Only now, it is delivering them to a local business, which makes and sells the compost. A three-year contract with DeForest-based landscape company Circle B will cost the city between $160,000 and $185,000 annually.
“It was definitely going to be less than what the county would charge us,” Dreckmann says.
Dane County solid waste manager John Welch says the county was subsidizing the program and had to charge more. “The rates were raised to reflect the true cost of operating the compost program,” he says. “We never raised rates in 20-plus years, despite our labor and operating costs going up. Our fuel cost went up 700% in that time.”
The county compost sites were not supported primarily by tax dollars, but by the “tipping fees” that garbage haulers pay to dump waste at the county landfill. The county ran the compost sites, Welch says, “because it’s the better, more responsible thing to do, composting these materials, rather than landfilling them.” There is also a 1993 state law banning the landfilling of yard waste.
Dreckmann suspects the recent expansion of Dane County’s Rodefeld landfill prompted the $200,000 composting fee increase. “This was an attempt to recoup some of the revenue they were anticipating but that was sacrificed during the landfill negotiation,” he says.
Welch disputes that. “We had to look at the landfill expansion and the entire solid waste operation and say, okay, there’s a new reality here. With all the services we are providing, and want to continue to provide, here’s the reality of what it costs. How do we pay for it between all the services we provide and all the revenues we collect? It made the most sense to say, this is what it costs to run the compost operation. It should be able to stand on its own. And the users of the compost program should be paying for the compost program.”
Many residents who use community gardens lack their own land to grow food for their families. For years, they received free deliveries of the city-county compost, paid for by the nonprofit Community Action Coalition of South Central Wisconsin and hauled for free by the city. Some gardeners now worry they won’t be able to get fertilizer.
“I think the city really needs to support community gardens and the infrastructure that is needed,” says Sue Rosa, a gardener at Quann Community Garden on Madison’s south side. “People need access to land to grow food.”
Joe Mathers is the former community garden coordinator for Community Action Coalition. The group no longer oversees the garden program, but Mathers has been volunteering his time working with a group of gardeners to find resources. “Compost is going to happen this year, but it’s going to happen differently.”
He’s getting bids from Purple Cow, a Middleton-based company that also makes plant-based compost from municipal leaf collection, as well as Circle B.
The county will dispense the remainder of its compost for free on April 20 to 25 at both the Westport and Verona sites. Meanwhile, the city is still providing leaves to Olbrich Gardens to create leaf mulch. However, this is a much smaller program, and compost is a better fertilizer than mulch.
Dreckmann stresses that Madison will still offer compost to the public, starting in May. It just costs more now. While a pickup truck load — roughly two cubic yards — used to cost $10 from the county, Circle B will sell a cubic yard of compost for $29.50 at 6402 Loftus Rd. in DeForest. For an extra $35, it will deliver a minimum of two cubic yards.
A dumptruck load of compost, which used to cost $100, will now cost $200, says Dreckmann, adding the city can deliver. “We don’t charge to deliver it, but they have to pay the fee for the material.”
