East Central Iowa News

During a Jan. 23 meeting, the City Council of Marshalltown discussed their composting facility, which is open from April through November each year.

At the meeting, City officials discussed what the new operating hours of the facility should be. Heather Thomas, the director of Public Works, reported to the council because the facility was running in a deficit of almost $30,000. Despite adjusting their drop-off fees and looking at capital purchase needs, they do not anticipate recovering from the deficit in their current state.

"The two options we've outlined are based on the statistics that I just read in the previous three pieces," Thomas said in the meeting. "One would be to keep the compost facility open Monday, Tuesday, Friday and Saturday. We estimate a potential wage savings of about $8700 a year. Option 2 would be to open the facility Tuesdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays with a potential savings of about $10,200 a year. This is again totally an option thing. It's not something we have to do, but we wanted to see if there was any support in doing this. In addition to helping us with the gap between revenue and expenses—we have had issues staffing the compost facility. Doing one of these options where we would close three days a week would allow us to go from six attendants to four attendants in a given year. And like I said, we've struggled to get all six hired."

Thomas proposed altering the operating hours of the composting facility. This would not single-handedly solve the deficit and budget problems, but it would be an improvement. The facility normally employs three part-time employees in the first half of the season and three part-time employees in the second half of the season. These employees earn $9 an hour starting pay and max out at $10 an hour after four years. After studying the least popular days for compost drop off, it was suggested that they close to the public on Monday through Thursday because those days have significantly less traffic than Friday through Sunday. The material drop-off and compost sales also showed the most traffic on weekends.

The council asked a few questions about the commercial haulers and when they come to the facility, which was solved by the haulers having their own gate code that allows them access to the drop-off site. They also discussed only opening Saturday and Sunday, but that limits some of the services they can provide because some are only offered during normal business hours.

The council decided on having the facility open Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.