Now I know that solid waste is complicated

Key Takeaways

As told by Will Naillon Custer County, Idaho commissioner

I started as a commissioner this year, and while I have some transferrable skills from working as a game and fish commissioner and working with the Department of Environmental Quality managing a mine site, there was still quite a learning curve. Solid waste was the biggest eye opener.

I’d love to go back to the days when your garbage just went away. It turns out it never does. It was one of the things that people often take for granted until it’s their job to make sure it happens. That’s the story of being a county commissioner.

We don’t have a landfill, but residents wanted one and the commissioners were trying to make it happen, but the cost was incredible to get it done.

I think that coming in, I was able to bring some new vigor. The long hard effort was wearing on people. 

It was clear right away that I didn’t know a thing about solid waste. You can get on the internet and learn things, but I wanted to see things firsthand. I felt like I owed it to the public. 

Anytime I was somewhere outside of Custer County, I toured their landfills and transfer sites and tried to learn. I learned a lot from Elmore County, Idaho and Park County, Mont. 

It was pretty clear early on that a landfill wasn’t going to be a viable solution for us in a county of 4,400 people. You need between 8,000 to 10,000 people for a self-sustaining county — that’s the magic number. Otherwise, the money’s just not there. We couldn’t ask the taxpayers to support that the way our county exists now. 

So now we just want to build a transfer station so that we can be more efficient transporting our waste to a landfill outside of the county. We can put that in the county seat, Challis, and locate convenience stations in two other communities and that should offer a good level of service.

In the process of running for office, I found out that my grandfather was a Custer County commissioner 100 years ago. My family homesteaded here, and we knew a lot of our family history, but nobody mentioned this grandfather until my sister mentioned that our grandmother said something about Grandpa Dave years ago. My mom didn’t know anything about it and neither did virtually anyone else in my family until my sister went to the county clerk’s office and looked in the old logbook. There it was – David Johnson. I wonder what he learned about county government in his first year? 

Now I Know features leaning experiences from county officials as told to senior writer Charlie Ban.