Desperately Poor County in W. Virginia Tries to Get Itself Trashed : Economics: It hopes to open one of the largest landfills in nation as a way to create jobs, obtain a sewage plant. Litter would come in by the trainload.

McDowell County has seen the future, and it’s trash by the trainload.

In one of the poorest counties in all of economically depressed Appalachia, residents are counting on a mammoth landfill to bring in out-of-state trash to create jobs and spur development.

It’s a hope born partly out of desperation.

“If we weren’t so economically depressed, we might not be so elated about it,” said Welch Mayor Martha Moore. “But we’re looking beyond that. We’re looking at it as a steppingstone to the future.”

Philadelphia-based Capels Resources Inc. wants to turn 6,000 acres into 10 to 12 landfills in an area about 80 miles south of Charleston.

When completed, the $60-million to $80-million operation will be capable of handling 10,000 tons of trash a day and will be among the largest landfills in the nation, according to the National Solid Waste Management Assn.

It will be able to handle 2 1/2 times as much trash as the entire state of West Virginia can produce, according to the trade group.

The trash will be shipped in by rail, unloaded in an indoor transfer station and then trucked about three miles up Shannon Branch and Lick Branch, a pair of typically remote, typically steep hollows that snake through the countryside near the town of Capels, about three miles northeast of Welch.

In return, Capels Resources promises to build a countywide sewage-treatment plant, provide an inexpensive place for county residents to dispose of their trash, generate tax money for the county, and--perhaps the biggest selling point--create 367 permanent jobs.

Capels Resources has agreed to pay various county government agencies about $2.30 for each ton of trash and hire 50% of its construction workers and 90% of its permanent landfill workers from McDowell County.

In a place where the unemployment rate hovers at 16% and where families flee by the carload to seek work, those jobs look awfully encouraging.

“They say they’ll hire 300 people. That sounds good to those men who’ve been out of work, some of them for six or eight years,” said Juanita Hicks of Caretta, whose husband, James, was laid off from the coal mines five years ago.

Hicks already has worked three days at the landfill site, helping prepare wells to test ground water for contamination, and he will not hesitate to go back if offered one of the $6- to $7-an-hour jobs, even though that’s about a third of union coal mine wages, his wife said.

The Shannon and Lick site is almost ideal for a landfill, Capels Resources President Jack Fugate said.

“We always try to locate a landfill where, if everything went wrong, it wouldn’t create a problem,” he said. “We think we have a site down there (where), if everything went wrong, we could still contain the problem.

“But the other reason quite frankly is that the county is willing to accept the facility,” he said. “Facilities like this are controversial.”

However, the landfill is not unanimously supported.

The West Virginia Environmental Council, made up of several environmental groups, opposes the landfill, saying it will be too large and will accept too much out-of-state trash.

“They have basically prostituted themselves into accepting trash as some sort of road to economic development,” council member Norm Steenstra said.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says 75% of the nation’s landfills will fill up within the next 10 years, and communities throughout the East are looking for new places to dump their trash.

Their gaze is increasingly focusing on largely rural states such as West Virginia, Kentucky and Indiana, where land is relatively cheap and available.

In 1989, New Jersey shipped 5.5 million tons of trash out of state, and New York contributed 2.4 million tons.

In many places, such as eastern Kentucky and central Indiana, residents are banding together to monitor the trash deliveries and fight the out-of-state garbage.

But, in southern West Virginia, the eager embrace of the giant landfill is an indication of just how bleak McDowell County’s outlook has become.

Since the height of the postwar coal boom, which saw the county’s population peak at nearly 100,000 in the 1950s, McDowell County has been suffering a slow, painful death.

The 1990 census put its population at 35,233, down almost a third since 1980.

The county’s per capita income, $7,919, is less than half of the national average of $16,490 a year.

It’s a land of rugged beauty and rugged life, where babbling mountain streams are polluted by raw sewage.

Vacant storefronts line the streets of small towns like War and Northfork, their broken windows a symbol of the broken dreams for workers who saw their jobs disappear. Traffic rolls past sagging houses covered with grimy coal dust.

For decades, local officials complain, the county’s booming coal industry generated millions in tax revenues for the state. It was money, they say, that was used elsewhere to improve roads, water and sewer lines and other amenities necessary to attract business.

Today, McDowell County is the largest county in the state without a four-lane highway, and its twisting, narrow roads and lack of adequate water and sewer services discourage businesses from locating there.

The county’s only sewage-treatment facility, in the former company town of Gary, was built by U.S. Steel Corp.

“The state has taken our tax money for all these years and has never done anything for us,” said Claude Banner, president of the McDowell County Economic Development Authority and a member of the board of directors of the McDowell County Improvement and Development Corp., a nonprofit agency set up by the county to oversee the landfill.

Three years ago, county leaders had another plan, later blocked by public opinion and state law. They wanted to open a nuclear waste disposal facility, again to create jobs and spur development.

Mayor Moore and other officials see the landfill as the county’s opportunity to set its own course without the help of, or interference from, state government.

“We have waited and depended on somebody else all our lives,” said Addie Davis, director of the economic development authority. “Ten years from now, you’re going to see McDowell County as a county that had a problem and did something about it.”

With Welch facing a federal Environmental Protection Agency order to build a sewage-treatment plant, Moore is particularly excited about the facility Capels Resources must build to handle the leachate, or liquid runoff, from the landfill.

The company has promised to make the sewage facility available to all municipalities in the county and will pick up the cost of running and maintaining it, Moore said.

One opponent of the landfill is the Rev. Jeffrey Allen of the Keystone and Northfork United Methodist churches. He argues that the county would be better served by concentrating on small, 10- to 15-employee businesses.

Focusing efforts on a single large employer eventually will leave the county in the same condition it was when the coal-mining jobs ran out, he said.

“If the landfill closes in 20 years and you have someone who started at the landfill when they were 20 years old, what happens when they’re 40?” Allen asked. “They’re kind of trapped again. They have limited skills at that point.”

The period specified by state law for residents to request that the landfill issue be put to a county referendum expired last year, with only limited opposition.

Opponents say that is because the public was not aware of just how huge the landfill will be, something Allen says he hopes will be addressed in additional public meetings on the proposal this summer.

There is little doubt that the project has the support of county officials.

The McDowell County Improvement and Development Corp. office, on the second floor of the county commission annex, adjoins the local Capels Resources Inc. headquarters. And McDowell County Improvement and Development is funded by Capels Resources.

Even those residents not enthusiastic about the landfill seem to be resigned to its inevitability.

“It’s awful. But it’s either bring something like that in or have people leave,” said Sharon Blevins of Capels, who lives a few hundred yards from the entrance to the proposed landfill.

Capels Resources already has spent $4.9 million on the project and has submitted the first phase of its application to the state Division of Natural Resources.

The state says the permit process will not be finished until mid-1992 at the earliest, and Fugate says the landfill could begin receiving trash six months later.

Proponents say the giant landfill will be “state of the art,” with precautions taken against polluting the ground water through a series of impermeable liners with pipes underneath that can carry off any leachate.

But McDowell County officials acknowledge that the county’s environment already has been abused by years of neglect and whatever damage the landfill causes cannot be any worse than the sewage-polluted streams, the earth scarred by unreclaimed strip mines or the drinking water taken from abandoned mines.

While McDowell County pins its hopes on a landfill, 19 other West Virginia counties have blocked landfill developments in the last 18 months, either through county commission action or through voter referendums, Steenstra said.

“We don’t care if the other 54 counties of West Virginia don’t want out-of-state trash,” Moore said. “Fine. We’ll honor that. But McDowell County has chosen this route.”