Reports of the Powell landfill’s death have been greatly exaggerated.

Although Park County officials are currently seeking an ominous-sounding “closure permit” from the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality, it’s just an administrative procedure related to work that was completed years ago. 

“Nothing’s changing at the landfill,” Park County Landfill Office Manager Sandie Morris said Monday. “The gates are open; everybody’s happy.”

The “closure” at the Powell landfill actually occurred back in 2012, when the county stopped burying household garbage at the site. A contractor then reclaimed the roughly 20 acres of old garbage pits in 2015, but the Department of Environmental Quality is only now considering a formal closure permit for those areas of the landfill.

“It’s the final phase of that whole operation that we started a long time ago,” Morris said.

As required by the DEQ, a public notice about the county’s pending closure permit was published in both the Powell Tribune and the Cody Enterprise. Readers of the papers noticed the announcement, which said in part that, “Park County has submitted a closure application for the Powell Landfill.”

By Monday, Morris said she’d fielded inquiries from a Powell landowner, the City of Powell and a landfill consultant from Green River about what was going on. That same day, Park County Engineer Brian Edwards took to the Public Works Department’s Facebook page to address rumors that the Powell landfill was shutting down.

“The public will not see or realize any changes in operations as a result of the permit action ... as it is purely administrative,” Edwards stressed in an email. “Operations will proceed at Cody, Powell and Clark landfills as they have over the past several years.”

While the old pits in Powell have been reclaimed, other areas remain active. The facility continues to accept all kinds of trash, ranging from construction and demolition materials to dead animals — and even household garbage. The only real difference for area residents is that their household garbage, known as municipal solid waste, is now collected in a bin and trucked to Cody to be dumped at the landfill there.

The county commission’s decision to stop burying municipal solid waste at the Powell site, spurred by cost-prohibitive upgrades required by DEQ, did force large customers to find new places to take their household trash. The City of Powell, for example, ultimately decided to take its trash to Billings, Montana, where rates are cheaper. Over the years, Park County commissioners have discussed ways to entice Powell to bring its trash to the county’s regional landfill south of Cody, but they can’t compete with Billings’ lower fees.

During a June discussion about landfill rates, county commissioners and staff did consider the possibility of shutting down the Powell and Clark landfills to save money; that was after seeing figures suggesting the fees collected at the sites don’t fully cover the costs. However, commissioners ultimately decided they were not interested in closing the two sites.

Morris said the Powell landfill has many years’ worth of space remaining. As long as the fees are paying the bills, she said closing it “would be an utter and complete waste.”

That’s why, despite the pending “closure permit,” nothing at the landfill is actually closing.

In his Facebook post, Edwards apologized for any confusion from the county’s public notice.

“People do picture something else when they hear the word ‘closed,’” he said in an email, but “in regulatory terms for solid waste landfills, this [means] something else.”