Jefferson & Park County 2014 Slash Collection Dates & Sites

I heard they were slammed last year.

Commissioner Rosier spoke at the Conifer Chamber meeting this morning and gave an update on Jeffco as a whole, but he answered questions about the slash collection initiative he'd tried to start. It turns out that their plans to develop on-site chipping at C-470/Kipling ran into a snag with the Denver Botanic Gardens (who owns that property around Chatfield) because they didn't think they could do it. So at the moment, they are requesting proposals from businesses to see if some entrepreneur can figure out a way to make their goal of 40 slash collection sites around the county feasibly work and pay for itself.

For now, we are stuck with only 3 collection sites over 6 days because though they want to help residents mitigate and reduce fire risk, it loses the county money to do them and they are facing a budget shortage in the coming years (what he also covered this am; they are spending about 18 million from the county savings account every year and at that pace will pend it out within 3-4 years).

It will be interesting to see the results of the Requests For Proposals that Jeffco put out to see if any commercial venture could create a plan to collect slash, process it, and do something with it in a break-even or profitable manner. The county was unable to make the Denver Botanic Gardens site work, and Commissioner Rosier would still really like to have ~40 collection sites set up around the county that operate year-round, not just on a few days of the year.

The issue with chipping is that you have to:
A. Pay for a chipper - own or rent - to be on-site
B. hire trucks to haul the chipped material somewhere
C. have a place willing to take and store it - piles of chipped organic material generate a ton of heat and can spontaneously combust (hubby's company had to deal with this when cleaning up after Hurricane Sandy in NJ and NY - they had an airport size facility with piles that filled multiple barges a day). They have to be turned every day while they decompose - that means staff and equipment. The compost they generate would be great to offer back to residents - after all, the rich nutrients in the soil will eventually be depleted if it isn't returned to the area and I'm sure there's interest from gardeners to purchase that.

Now, if the chipped material is just burned instead of composted, that saves an expensive step, but is tricky because no one wants a curtain burner or other noisy, polluting machine near their home or in the mountains. Plus, while quicker to deal with the material, it isn't as good for the environment - soot particles generated, loss of compost to put back into environment, etc.

So like I say, it will be interesting to see what's proposed, and then what landowners up here are willing to pay for, or have set up near them. It's going to take a lot of planning, money, and dialog.