Landfill and Medicaid bills will have long-lasting effects

This year’s short session of the General Assembly concluded with two decisions that will have long-lasting impacts on Columbus County: stopping the Riegel Ridge landfill in the Green Swamp and ending the unfair Medicaid burden on counties.

The eight-year debate over the Riegel Ridge landfill is officially over. The bill that stopped Riegel Ridge says that companies cannot build landfills near streams, national wildlife refuges, state parks and state game lands. Riegel Ridge was to be constructed near newly approved game lands in the Green Swamp.

Riegel Ridge drew resistance from county residents from the start, especially residents of nearby Bolton and Lake Waccamaw. The county commissioners approved the regional landfill in 1999 after a recommendation by a citizens solid waste committee.

Riegel Ridge had received most of its permits to build, but three factors killed it.
Its proximity to Lake Waccamaw and Nature Conservancy land in the Green Swamp added weight to arguments that the landfill would harm water quality and spoil vast acres of woodlands around it.

Second, residents countywide were never happy that we’d be burying other peoples’ trash in our own backyard.

Third, three other regional landfills, particularly one mega-landfill proposed in Camden County that would have received garbage from the entire eastern seaboard, added fuel to the fire that North Carolina was on the verge of becoming a dumping ground.

Even though the Riegel Ridge landfill would have brought about $1 million annually in revenues for the county, and it was nearly at the end of the permitting process, public sentiment won out. People’s voices were heard.

The Medicaid victory was important in two ways. From a practical standpoint, the county will have more money to spend on schools and infrastructure. On another level, ending reimbursements was a symbolic statement from Raleigh recognizing that efforts must be made to lessen the gap between the two North Carolinas, a state that still has large pockets of poverty among areas of unprecedented prosperity.

Poor counties like Columbus saw as much as 20 percent of its property tax collections allocated to fund Medicaid reimbursements to the federal government.

Prosperous counties like Orange and Wake counties, where the percentage of Medicaid recipients is significantly lower, had reimbursements of only 3 to 5 percent.
This only widened the chasm between the rich and the poor.

Medicaid reimbursements will still be required on a statewide basis, but the new formula means that poor counties will have less of a burden.

Rarely does a legislative session have the impact on Columbus County that this one did. The effects of both the landfill and Medicaid bills will be long-lasting. On both issues, public sentiment and activism won the day.