Ongoing Coverage: Kentucky county with few options says no to becoming regional dump
Updated: Sep 19
Not far from where I was based in Eastern Kentucky covering the region for the Lexington Herald-Leader, I followed a local political disagreement that had regional and statewide ramifications.
Eastern KY residents fight proposed mega landfill project at abandoned mine site
PIKEVILLE, Ky. — Tensions are rising in an Eastern Kentucky community over whether the county government will permit construction of a 450-acre, privately owned and operated landfill on an abandoned surface mine.
Residents near the former Premier Elkhorn mine near Myra in Pike County say they are concerned about health and environmental risks if their community plays host to a mega-landfill site that would accept waste by rail and truck from surrounding areas in at least three states.
The Pike County Fiscal Court entered into a host agreement late last month with USA Waste and Recycling to explore whether the mine is suitable for construction of a landfill that could store up to 170 million cubic yards of trash. A USA affiliate signed an option agreement with the mine reclamation firm that owns the site Dec. 31.
The county is one of only a handful in Kentucky that owns and operates its own landfill, but officials say that operation on Ford Mountain, near Meta, is reaching capacity.
State grants have expanded the facility at least twice now since devastating Eastern Kentucky floods overburdened it with wreckage in 2022 and 2025, but future expansions would be too costly, says Judge-Executive Ray Jones.
“The only way to contain your garbage bill is to partner with a private company,” Jones said. “It’s the only way. That’s why only six of 120 counties have them.”
A mine with a rocky past
The Premier mine complex on Shelby Creek in Pike County has had a rocky history since TECO Energy bought and began developing the property in the early 1990s.
TECO abruptly dumped its coal-mining assets in late 2015, leaving the fate of hundreds of employees and a mine producing more than 4 million tons of coal annually up in the air. Cambrian Coal snagged the mine in a sale of property in Perry County and neighboring Buchannan County, Virginia, but production dwindled to less than a million tons annually by 2019 and Cambrian filed for bankruptcy.
A locally formed firm purchased the mine as part of the bankruptcy estate sale in September 2019, but defaulted on its bonding obligations to its insurance company, which acquired the title in 2024. Last year, a reclamation firm bought the insurance company’s mine assets and immediately began negotiating with a USA affiliate to redevelop it as a landfill.
“Its beautiful, mountainous terrain,” said Ray Ratliff, a community organizer who lives in Ashcamp, a few miles southeast of the proposed landfill. “The community is like a close-knit family.”
That family is worried about the smell and mess a landfill would create. Abandoned coal mines are fragile, damaged ecosystems prone to leaching harmful toxins into surface and groundwater resources. The Premier and Cambrian mine complexes sit about 1,000 feet up a mountain immediately downstream of larger communities like Virgie, Robinson Creek, Shelbiana and, eventually, the county seat and regional economic center of Pikeville.
“We feel like the county hasn’t been transparent about this,” Ratliff said. “We just suddenly found out that a huge landfill will be built.”
An ‘environmental disaster’ looms
Judge Jones said the county has conducted all of its negotiations with the Connecticut-based USA waste management team publicly and nothing has been finalized.
USA has spent roughly half a million dollars in private engineering costs to determine the feasibility of a landfill there, but there is still work left to be done. Plus, he said, there are environmental and economic considerations that are being left out of the public conversation about the landfill that remain top of mind to him.
Until recently, the county was actively pursuing yet another expansion project of the Ford Mountain landfill. Initial estimates put the price tag of that project somewhere around $1.4 million. But the expansion would involve moving 177,000 cubic yards of waste at the toe of the landfill to the top and building a 70-foot-tall berm further down a mountain valley.
That is a dangerous, costly maneuver, the judge said. Done wrong, and the slope could collapse.
“If you have a failure of the slope, it could be economically catastrophic and an environmental disaster.”
The latest estimates of the project are closer to $18 million, which Jones said Pike County’s declining population, much of which is on a fixed income, simply cannot afford.
“Don’t shoot the messenger,” Jones told members of the public who attended a special-called fiscal court session Feb. 16 to discuss the landfill project, “but listen to the message.”
EKY county backs out of landfill agreement, raising specter of fines, litigation
The Pike County Fiscal Court voted 3-1 Tuesday night to rescind the agreement it entered into with a waste management company to convert an abandoned coal mine into a 450-acre landfill.
The move raises unanswered questions about the county’s obligations under the contract and whether it may have exposed itself to civil litigation.
A packed special-called meeting billed as an opportunity for county commissioners to ask the county attorney’s office questions about the controversial landfill project quickly devolved into shouting and name-calling Feb. 24, as members of the public threw insults at Judge-Executive Ray Jones and insisted that the proposal be rescinded.
The judge-executive, who was the lone “no” vote on rescinding the agreement, backed the Feb. 10 contract as an economic development project that would save the county money. An existing Pike County landfill is nearing capacity, and the fiscal court has not set aside funds to close it.
But residents near the former Premier Elkhorn mine in Myra say they fear the mega landfill accepting trash from several states by truck and train into Pike County would turn the mountainous Appalachian community into the region’s dump. The delicate land left behind by several failed coal mining ventures could give way to an environmental disaster that would threaten their livelihoods and ruin their homes, opponents say.
“I’ve got a farm, and they’re going to put me out of business,” said James Cochran, 70, a retired coal miner who lives in Dorton, about 5 miles from landfill project. “The bees is going to die. I ain’t going to have no bees. The chickens are going to die. I ain’t going to have no chickens. This is my retirement.”
The commission’s unplanned decision to renege its end of the development deal could be costly.
The contract the fiscal court authorized says American Land Reserve LLC, a company owned and operated by Connecticut-based USA Waste and Recycling, “is committing substantial capital expenditures and undertaking a large-scale, long-term infrastructure investment in express reliance upon the County’s obligations under this Agreement.”
USA Waste and Recycling did not immediately respond to a Herald-Leader request for comment Tuesday evening, and it no company representatives publicly identified themselves at the meeting.
If the county doesn’t hold up its end of the deal, it could be obligated to pay back the company for what it has already spent on the project, plus an estimate of the profits the company would have earned during the remaining portion of the term and additional expenditures the company may incur because of the county’s decision to back out.
The parties agreed to cover “reasonable attorney’s fees, court costs and litigation expenses” if either defaults on its obligations. Failure to do so could open the door to arbitration or a federal lawsuit.
Last week, Jones said he believes the company has spent about $50,000 already in site work to study the abandoned mine. Assistant Pike County Attorney Roy Downey told the commissioners he does not have an accurate estimate of how much money the company has already spent. He later declined to comment when asked by a Herald-Leader reporter.
County Commissioner Freddie Lewis, who made the motion Tuesday to rescind the contract, said none of the candidates for judge-executive or county commissioner in this year’s general election support the landfill project, and Jones isn’t running to reclaim his seat. For that reason, he said, it was better to end the deal now in order to keep down any costs the county may have to pay back to the company.
“If we waited, we could have bankrupted this county,” Lewis told the Herald-Leader after Tuesday’s meeting.
Pike County is one of only six counties in Kentucky that owns and operates its own landfill. Jones has said the county’s stake to preserve or close its landfill on Ford Mountain, near the community of Meta, is expensive. The fiscal court has already voted once during his term to increase waste collection fees. The company seeking to develop a private landfill near Myra had offered to accept the county’s trash for free.
“Maybe, just maybe, there’s two sides to this story,” Jones said during Tuesday’s meeting. “You all can do whatever you want to do on it. I just suggest you let the other party come down here and speak.”
The fiscal court was scheduled to hear representatives from the company speak at a meeting next week. It’s unclear whether that meeting will proceed as planned.
Central Appalachian commissioners rubber stamp ‘no’ vote on mega landfill project
A project from an out-of-state waste management company to build a mega landfill on an abandoned coal mine in the central Appalachian community of Myra is dead after Pike County commissioners affirmed their decision to back out the contract this week.
Over the strong objections of Judge-Executive Ray Jones, he and the commissioners voted 3-1 Tuesday to rescind the agreement the county signed with a USA Waste and Recycling affiliate in early February. It was the board’s second vote on the matter after concern a similar vote Feb. 24 may have violated state law.
That decision could expose Pike County to civil litigation, since the host agreement the fiscal court had already unanimously authorized Jones to sign stipulates damages should either of the parties pull out. It also reveals a deep undercurrent of distrust in a far-Eastern Kentucky community reshaping the way it governs itself amid a worsening economic crisis triggered by the collapsed coal industry.
“If we put a landfill here, we’re only destroying our county more and more people will move away from it,” said Linda Anders, who lives in the Pike County community of Dorton.
The project, now seemingly dead, would have converted an abandoned coal mine high up above Pike County’s Shelby Valley into a mega landfill, shipping in garbage from as far away as Lexington and surrounding states by rail and truck. Residents have been up in arms about it since after they learned the fiscal court OK’d the project last month, and many have turned their ire at Jones, who they believe operated without transparency.
Bowing to pressure from those furious members of the public who have packed several of the last few commission meetings, the three county commissioners suddenly made a motion and voted to back out of the agreement last week, setting off a series of questions that may ultimately be resolved in court.
Jones was the lone dissenting vote during both votes.
This week’s second vote would have been unnecessary, but the commission’s first vote was unplanned. Discussions and action at a special or emergency meeting “shall be limited to items listed on the agenda in the notice,” according to Kentucky’s Open Meetings Act. The Feb. 24 special-called fiscal court meeting was billed as an opportunity for the commissioners to ask the county attorney’s office questions about the proposed 450-acre landfill. There was nothing listed on the agenda about a decision to rescind the contract.
The commissioners “wanted to be certain” that their decision to rescind the contract was valid, Commissioner Ronald Scott said early Wednesday morning after the second vote. But Scott and other commissioners have refused to answer questions about whether they believe their decision could land the county in federal court.
Jones said he has been in contact with representatives from USA Waste and Recycling but opted not to comment on legal questions due to what he called “pending or possible litigation.” Neither the Connecticut-based company nor an attorney representing its Lexington affiliate have responded to repeated Herald-Leader requests for comment.
If the county doesn’t hold up its end of the deal, it could be obligated to pay back the company for what it has already spent on the project, plus an estimate of the profits it would have earned during the remaining portion of the term and additional expenditures the company may incur because of the county’s decision to back out, according to the agreement.
The parties agreed to cover “reasonable attorney’s fees, court costs and litigation expenses” if either defaults on its obligations. Failure to do so could open the door to arbitration or a lawsuit.
Pike County’s existing landfill on Ford Mountain near the community of Meta is nearing capacity.
An ongoing expansion project there could buy the county a few more years, but a larger, full-scale expansion could cost upward of $18 million, which simply isn’t in the county’s budget or borrowing power, Jones said. It would also require cutting into the toe of a tall berm holding back decades worth of garbage from flooding the valley below. A public elementary school sits at the bottom of that valley on Kentucky Highway 194.
Meanwhile, the abandoned TECO Energy coal mine site that was being explored for development is holding back coal slurry impoundment more than 2,000 feet wide sitting a few hundred feet above Shelby Creek, a Levisa Fork tributary, where much of the region draws its drinking water.
Meanwhile, the abandoned TECO Energy coal mine site that was being explored for development is holding back coal slurry impoundment more than 2,000 feet wide sitting a few hundred feet above Shelby Creek, a Levisa Fork tributary, where much of the region draws its drinking water.
Simply put, that partnership was the county’s last best option, Jones said. He challenged commissioners Tuesday night to come up with a better option, but other than a few “ideas” or “thoughts,” like an industrial shredder, the commission had none.
Jones said the project promised 100 construction jobs and 50 permanent posts in a community rapidly losing coal mining revenue and population as a result. He was eager to explore redeveloping an environmentally hazardous site in a way that could bring at least some new revenue.
‘No’ no matter what, residents say
The decision to rescind the contract was just a reflection of the community’s will, Scott said.
He said he believes Pike County residents are prepared to pay higher garbage collection fees for their trash to be shipped off to another community because they do not want their mountain towns to be known as the region’s dump. Only six counties in Kentucky own and operate their own landfills. The majority of the state’s garbage is handled by private companies.
“People do not want [to have a dump],” Scott said. “They put their foot down.”
The landfill promised to ship in tons of garbage by rail and truck into Pike County from surrounding counties and states.
Hundreds of protesters have packed the fiscal court chambers in downtown Pikeville to verbally spar with Jones over the proposal and voice their disapproval for what they call the lack of transparency surrounding the yearslong project.
“The people of Pike County, we’re not stupid,” said Nathan Little, a resident running for District 3 magistrate in the 2026 election. “We do not need to be lectured. We do not need to be managed. We do not need to be talked to like we don’t understand what’s happening in our own county.”
Many of those who spoke during the public comment Tuesday are running for office and called on Jones and the commission to be more transparent.
Jones, who is not running for reelection this fall, has been the subject of intense scrutiny since a 2023 referendum he opposed returned the county to a magisterial system. In November, voters will eliminate the three at-large elected commissioners in favor of six district-specific magistrates.
First elected in 2018, Jones took office two years after residents voted to oust the original magistrate government so commissioners could represent all voters equally. The referendum brought an abrupt halt to the experiment, and the county is now in the process of redrawing its legislative maps.
Jones has said he disagrees with the decision and fears it will mark a return of “good-ol’-boy politics” in Pike County.
Both the failed landfill project and the magistrate shift highlights Jones’ growing unpopularity in a once solidly Democratic county where politics are rapidly shifting to the right. Yet residents and candidates who spoke to the Herald-Leader Tuesday insist the landfill project isn’t political.
They just “don’t want to be the region’s dumping ground,” resident Sammy Wilson, another magistrate candidate, said