Dave Prunty makes sure Flathead County's roads get plowed each winter and road dust gets tamped down each summer. He makes sure potholes get filled and bridges are structurally sound. And he leads a constant effort to keep hundreds of thousands of tons of trash out of sight and out of mind for county residents.

Prunty, 52, started as Flathead County's solid waste director in 2002 before assuming additional responsibility for roads and bridges as part of a reorganization of the county government in 2007, earning his current title as public works director.

The road and solid waste departments each have an operating budget of roughly $8 million, and between the two Prunty oversees more than 70 employees. He's responsible for the maintenance of about 100 bridges, more than 800 miles of road and a landfill along U.S. 93 that took in 143,000 tons of garbage during the last fiscal year.

Running both departments involves splitting his time between the landfill (one to two days a week) and the road department building in Kalispell (three to four days a week). While Prunty tends to focus on "big-picture stuff," he relies heavily on operations managers and foremen who oversee day-to-day to activities.

"They handle a whole heck of a lot of the dealing with the crew, making sure the operations are going forward," Prunty said. "And I'm dealing with either the public or the commissioners, projects that need engineering done, and planning projects one, two, even five years into the future."

PRUNTY, WHO grew up in Bozeman, stumbled into the solid waste business after earning a civil engineering degree from Montana State University in 1992. He had been particularly interested in water and hydrology, as well as one professor's course on highway transportation. So after graduating, he asked that professor to help him find a job, and the professor connected him with a company in Bozeman that specialized in landfill operations.

It wasn't the precise field Prunty expected to work in, but it turned out to be a good fit, he said.

Prunty spent about three years with the company in Bozeman before leaving to help manage landfills around Sacramento, California, first as a consultant and then as an employee of a company there. He stayed in California for about five years and met his wife there through mutual friends. But he always longed to return to Montana.

"The first year was really tough. I was a Montana kid and I struggled, no questions about it. Living in California is a whole different world," he said. "And I did quickly realize, 'OK, this is great for my career, but how the heck am I going to get home? I wanted to be back in Montana. I guess I needed to leave it to realize how wonderful it was."

In 2000, Prunty's company sent him to Spokane, Washington, where he worked in the nascent composting industry. Through a contract with the municipal solid waste system, the company collected organic waste from various sites and began producing compost to be sold for gardening.

But then Prunty and his colleagues discovered a major problem: a popular, highly effective weedkiller called clopyralid, which was produced by the chemical giant Dow and used heavily on golf courses around Spokane.

"Aerobic decomposition creates heat, and heat typically breaks down the carbon chains that are in herbicides and pesticides," Prunty said. "Well, this was the first chemical that didn't break down. So it would come through the composting process from start to finish, and it was in the final product."

Soon, gardeners across the country discovered compost containing clopyralid was killing their tomatoes, peas and sunflowers and rendering other vegetables inedible. Spokane, Prunty said, was "ground zero" for the clopyralid problem.

"We had a product that was not unsellable, but it was tainted to sell," he said.

Outrage and lawsuits followed, and eventually, clopyralid was banned in the United States. After two years, Prunty said, his company decided to abandon its composting operation in Spokane.

AROUND THE same time, Prunty found the opportunity he had been looking for since he left Montana. Thumbing through a trade magazine, he spotted a job listing for the position of solid waste director in Flathead County. He applied right away.

Five years later, the county commissioners and County Administrator Mike Pence asked him to take on the new role of public works director. He quickly began making changes.

"When I first got to the road department, Flathead County was very much having struggles with dust off of the county roads," he said. "Citizens were very upset with dust off of the county roads."

So Prunty examined what other Montana counties had done to alleviate dust problems, and in 2008, after persuading Pence and the commissioners, he launched a cost-sharing program that enables road workers to spray magnesium chloride salt to tamp down dust.

Prunty said he modeled the program after one in Gallatin County. People who own land near county-maintained roads can apply for dust abatement, with the applicants and the county each covering half the cost.

"And the program has been fantastic," Prunty said. In its first year, landowners applied for dust abatement on 15 miles of road, and in 2019 the program had grown to include 106 miles, he said.

Prunty does consider the environmental impacts of road salting and the landfill, which has been prepared for possible expansion in the coming decades. He said he would prefer to recycle plastic rather than bury it, but that's been prohibitively expensive since China stopped importing the world's plastic waste in 2018.

Prunty also touted the county's 12-year partnership with the Flathead Electric Cooperative, which burns methane released from decomposing garbage in the landfill to generate electricity. It's the kind of system one would expect to find in a much larger metropolitan area, not a place like Flathead County, he said.

"We've made a system here where our residents' garbage is producing power for this valley," he said.

Reporter Chad Sokol can be reached at 758-4434 or csokol@dailyinterlake.com