Charlotte County supervisors look to end costs for old landfill

Published 8:10 pm Saturday, July 26, 2025

Charlotte County supervisors want to get free of an agreement that’s lasted 30 years and cost the county some significant dollars over those decades. During their Wednesday, July 9 meeting, board members unanimously voted to move forward with a termination plan. 

The issue involves the old county landfill, located roughly 1.5 miles south of the intersection of Route 40 and Route 645, just southwest of Charlotte Court House. Two cells in the landfill were closed before 1988 and the final one shut down in 1993. The entire thing was certified as closed on March 8, 1995. But there was a slight problem.

The landfill was built without a base liner or leachate collection system. Waste instead was placed into dug trenches. Basically, if there is any liquid, it goes directly to the dirt and gravel. If something like paint or oil was mistakenly put in there, those liquids could seep into the ground. Now when a landfill gets shut down in Virginia, it goes through the Post Closure Care (PCC) program, run by the Department of Environmental Quality. The county has to pay engineers to come in each year, perform tests and monitor the ground, to make sure no chemicals have escaped and no damage has been done. 

This isn’t a cheap process. Over the last five years alone, Charlotte County has spent $279,074.65 on the monitoring and inspections. That includes $50,857.80 to date for fiscal year 2025; $78,724.61 for fiscal year 2024; $53,369.25 for fiscal year 2023; $37,773 for fiscal year 2022 and $58,349.99 for fiscal year 2021. 

Suggesting an alternative 

In their July 9 meeting, Supervisors Chairman Walt Bailey suggested moving forward with a different project to solve the problem. He proposed using a staff recommendation and getting Dewberry Engineering to write a series of letters and provide data for the state, requesting termination from the post closure monitoring programs. 

“We have been paying an engineering firm a lot of money each year basically to come back and tell us what is out of wack,” Bailey said. 

The answer to that so far has been nothing. Nothing has been out of wack at the 48.4 acre site. 

And that has been the case for several years now. So a few years ago, Charlotte County staff started looking into the process for removing the landfill from the program. Since 1993, the county has been paying for testing of the wells, additional wells, and other required monitoring. Since it has been clear for so long, Bailey wants to wrap up the county’s financial involvement. 

Charlotte County supervisors look at cost

The expected total as to what getting out would cost the county, comes to $29,000. That would be payable to Dewberry Engineers and split into three parts. First, $10,000 for the paperwork and everything involved with a Groundwater Corrective Action termination, then $10,000 to file the paperwork and work with the state on getting the county out of the post closure care program. And finally, $9,000 to document, under the Uniform Environmental Covenant Act, that there are no issues at the site and haven’t been for years. 

“Currently, we’re spending between $50,000 to $80,000 a year to have the testing done, (which says) basically nothing is happening,” Bailey said. “It would be an investment of $29,000 but we have the potential to save a lot of money.” 

Supervisors agreed to move forward with the idea, pulling $29,000 from reserve funds to cover the cost.