Next month, the Kanawha County Solid Waste Authority will officially be out of money.
James Young, the executive director, has even been filling up jugs of water at home, then bringing them to his office in a cramped trailer on Slack Street to save money.
"We've been trying to take measures to minimize the losses every month," Young said.
To date, the Solid Waste Authority has lost $36,951 in the 2015 fiscal year, which ends June 30. It has effectively burned up the nest egg the authority accumulated while a private company operated the Kanawha County recycling plant.
"We knew it wasn't going to be sustainable," Young said. "It's always been inevitable that the funding would run out."
Currently, items that are dropped off at Slack Street are taken by Waste Management to WV Cashin in Nitro. The authority pays $163.50 per load to Waste Management to transport the loads and $150 per load to WV Cashin to process them. But right now, recycling prices are so low that they're basically giving the paper and cardboard to WV Cashin, according to Young. They only get money back for the plastic and metal.
"It's not their fault that there's no market for recyclables right now," said Kanawha County Commissioner Dave Hardy.
Since he took over, Young has been plugging holes in a sinking ship. Since the authority no longer has a building where they can process recyclables, they have to haul them to Nitro. But because the authority doesn't have a vehicle that can carry the loads, they have to use Waste Management to do it for them. That has led to an average loss of between $5,500 and $6,500 a month.
Young is working on that. He has applied for and received almost $200,000 in grants over the past year and most of that has been put toward new equipment. They're expecting a truck in late February - it's currently having a hoist installed - that will allow them to cut the contract with Waste Management and save around $2,000 a month.
The authority is looking at possibly taking out a loan to build a new processing facility and has a potential lead on a building that they could purchase with grant money, but any change to the status quo is unlikely to be seen soon.
"I'm excited about the prospects, but I'm also a realist," Hardy said. "Right now they're still running in the red."
Losing money isn't unusual for county recycling providers. Young said that the only county in West Virginia that consistently turns a profit on its recycling is Greenbrier.
"To break even is really an accomplishment," Young said. "Especially to break even without any grant dollars."
That has left the Kanawha authority scrambling to find some source of money. As an independent state agency, the Kanawha County Commission is not responsible for financing the authority, although they have in the past and currently appoint two members to the authority's five-member board.
"I want to make sure that they have cut every expense that they could possibly cut," Hardy said when asked if the Commission would think about financing.
Commission President Kent Carper was on the same page. He said that he thought that recycling was important, but that the authority needed a new business model.
Currently, the authority only has three employees, including Young. They are running a bare-bones recycling program out of Slack Street, hand-sorting the items that are brought in.
Both Hardy and Carper acknowledged the importance of the recycling program, and since the people of Kanawha County voted to have a recycling program, they have to figure out a way to keep the program up and running.
But in a time of budget cuts, they're worried about what that may require.
"I don't think there's any desire to subsidize them on a long-term level," Hardy said.
Young is worried about something else: the prospect of having to shut down the recycling program for the second time in as many years.
"Our greatest fear is that we don't want to hit the reset button and have to try to get people back again," Young said.
Reach Daniel Desrochers at dan.desrochers@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-4886 or follow @drdesrochers on Twitter.