At Ashley Lake’s green-box site, heaps of tires are a common sight. Heaps of building supplies are piled near Coram’s green boxes and rusted hulks of small boats glint in the hot sun at the Bigfork refuse-collection site.

These are some of the problems Flathead County sanitation engineers have to deal with on a daily basis. All of the above items are banned from county green-box locations, yet many people continue to dump items that do not belong there.

County Public Works Director Dave Prunty said it’s a problem akin to the broken windows theory.

“Each and every day people drop off this stuff,” he said. “Things seem to breed when they see junk at these sites and more and morew stuff gets dropped off. If we haven’t been out that day cleaning up the sites, they probably look like hell.”

Prunty said Bigfork, Somers, Ashley Lake and Coram were the worst sites in terms of junk dropped off there. Harder-to-reach sites such as Lakeside and Olney tended to be in better shape. 

The Columbia Falls site, which has been staffed since 2010, has shown marked improvement. Other sites could soon see employees on hand to deter dumping.

Jim Chilton, the operations manager at the county landfill, said people’s bad behavior has caused the change.

“What’s driving staffing to green-box sites is the commercial dumping we see around the county,” he said. “It’s primarily a lot of oversize items like couches, mattresses and tires in very large quantities. This means it is most likely businesses because homeowners don’t typically dump 80 or 100 tires at one time.”

This is despite ample signs around the sites that clearly state tires, wood products, toilets, furniture and televisions are prohibited.

Prunty said when a perpetrator is caught dumping some of the junk around the sites, the Flathead County Sheriff’s Office has been very quick to respond.

Even so, he said all this is treating the symptom and not the disease.

“The green-box sites were never designed to handle this,” he said. “The [county] commissioners luckily are very understanding that what worked in the past might not be working now.”

The commissioners have approved four full-time-equivalent positions to help with the green boxes. Three of the positions will be at Somers and Creston with the fourth as a “rover” who will go between Lakeside and Bigfork.

The options that exist for people who need to dump large items (more than just typical household garbage or recycling) are limited to the county landfill.

Chilton said this isn’t a bad thing for homeowners.

“Household garbage is fine to throw away at the landfill, just not things like oversized lumber,” he said. “Typically we will let people throw away a couch or mattress for free because we know people need to do that sometimes. But if you are bringing in load after load, week after week, we will charge you. Commercial people can’t drop all their stuff off for free.”

Things that can be dropped off at the green-box sites without risk of fines or jail time include washing machines, dryers, hot water heaters and any sort of large metal appliance.

Chilton said the revenue the county gets from recycling the scrap steel from these appliances helps run the green-box program.

Neither man gave a timeline on when the new staff members would be around the green boxes, but both urged responsible disposal of garbage.

There’s only so much space for tire piles at Ashley Lake.

Reporter Ryan Murray may be reached at 758-4436 or by email at rmurray@dailyinterlake.com.