ARIZONA

You can't get anything you want at this trash site on Thanksgiving

Just like 50 Thanksgivings ago, trouble started when a small town's trash dump was closed for the holiday.

Michael Kiefer
The Republic | azcentral.com
The Maricopa County transfer station in Aguila was closed for the Thanksgiving holiday.
  • Trash was piling up outside of snowbirds' homes in Aguila
  • County site is only open two days a week; gets little use
  • Illegal desert dumping is a problem in the area

Fifty Thanksgivings ago, that is, 50 years ago on Thanksgiving, a teenager was arrested in Stockbridge, Mass., for throwing a VW-Microbusload of garbage down a hillside because the town dump was closed.

From that experience, the teenager, Arlo Guthrie, penned a comic, 18-minute-long antiwar talking blues called “Alice’s Restaurant” that became a cultural icon of the 1970s and a Thanksgiving radio tradition.

This Thanksgiving, a similar dump closure had residents singing the blues in Aguila, a backwater zip code in northern-most Maricopa County.

The transfer station run by the county is only open on Thursdays and Fridays, meaning it was closed this month for the Thanksgiving holiday. So garbage piled up outside the homes of snowbirds, who already feel that the transfer station is not open enough.

Furthermore, they worried that the scarcity of dump time would provoke latter-day Guthries to gather shovels and rakes and implements of destruction and dump  their garbage in the desert.

“This is contributing to a health hazard,” part-time Aguila resident Martha Home wrote to The Arizona Republic. “Garbage is standing near homes awaiting opportunity to be properly disposed of, and is attracting rats, coyotes and offensive birds.”

Home sent along digital photos — instead of 8-by-10 color glossy pictures — with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back explaining what each one was.

And indeed, the desert there is dumped on, with too few Officer Obies to arrest the litterbugs.

“There’s trash everywhere," Home said.

Less than a mile down a dirt road from Home’s home is a picturesque frontier cemetery beneath a mountain topped by a hole-in-the-rock formation called Eagle Eye. Thirty yards to either side are mounds of trash — construction waste, old clothes, broken furniture and an alarming number of abandoned baby dolls, their flesh-colored plastic heads clashing creepily with the desert gravel.

One of Home's neighbors, Butch Dyrland, 70, a former deputy sheriff and game warden from Minnesota, said he has had several illegal dumpers arrested.

“We’d like a little longer time (at the transfer station) because we’ve had a lot problems in the desert," he said.

We'll get back to that debate

Martha Home walks through garbage dumped in the desert near her Aguila house.

Whether the desert dumping is a direct result of the transfer station closure or just a distasteful long-time Arizona tendency is a subject of debate.

But we’ll just wait for that to come around again on the gee-tar, as Guthrie would say, while we tell you about the town of Aguila.

Aguila, population 798, is an unincorporated farm town nearly 30 miles up Route 60 from Wickenburg. It's almost two hours away from downtown Phoenix. And even though the town is nearly 100 miles from the Maricopa County supervisors’ offices, it is part of Maricopa County, which is responsible for its policing and other services, like trash disposal.

The shops and shacks resemble those of the border towns on the highway between the U.S.-Mexico border crossing in Lukeville to the beach in Puerto Penasco, Sonora.

And though 70 percent of Aguila's residents are Hispanic, mostly agricultural workers, the name of the town is pronounced the American way, “Ah-GEEL-ah,” instead of the Spanish way, “AH-gee-la,” which means “eagle,” hence the abundance of eagle references in other place names.

Home, 74, lives with her partner, Gordon Jelm, 78, in a nearby development called Eagle Roost Air Park, a collection of upscale homes grouped around an air strip. The houses have airplane hangars in addition to garages.

Jelm, a retired TWA pilot, and Home, who sold insurance in Oregon but now sells air-park real estate, have two small planes in their hangar, along with a vintage Mercedes, a motor home and a high-end motorcycle. They split the year between Alaska and Arizona, sometimes flying, sometimes driving in the motor home.

Garbage pick-up service is available from a private company to the residents of Eagles Roost, but many don’t want to pay the $22 per month fee while they are away. So they cart their own garbage and recyclables three miles up Route 60 to the county transfer station: $4 per load, $8 for a sofa or refrigerator, recyclables free.

But the transfer station is locked up tight behind a chain-link fence and barbed wire five days a week.

“They used to only have one day a week, then it went to four days and now two,” said Dina Hardy, who commutes between the transfer stations in Aguila and the one 30 miles south on Route 60 in the town of Morristown, which is open Wednesdays and Saturdays. Hardy has been the lone staffer at both for 11 years.

Hardy, a county employee, had paid holidays last Thursday and Friday, and hopefully,  a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat.

Garbage-in, garbage out

The Aguila Transfer Station is open Thursdays and Fridays.

The county’s garbage numbers show that only 109 people used the Aguila transfer station in November, less than half the number that used the Morristown station – which had 263 visitors that month. Since the fiscal year began July 1, there were only 464 visits to the Aguila station; 1,130 to Morristown.

“We could use our dollars for other days at locations where there is higher demand and more people,” said Brian Kehoe, director of Maricopa County Waste Resources and Recycling.

And in all of fiscal year 2104, the Aguila station took in $5,855 in revenue, Morristown $8,698, not even enough to pay half of Hardy’s salary, let alone operating expenses.

“I don’t think the county is obligated to provide dumps seven days a week,” said County Supervisor Clint Hickman, whose district includes Aguila.

As to whether the scant hours contribute to desert dumping, Hardy was skeptical.

“Dumping in the desert is going to go on,” she said, and she admitted that sometimes she lets people leave trash loads even if they balk at the fee, because she has a pretty good idea of where the load may end up.

The facilities need to be locked up most of the week, Kehoe said, to keep people from dumping hazardous waste that cannot go to the landfill.

He hopes the Aguila complaints are a one-time thing.

“We missed the boat on that one,” he said, “but for the future, we probably won’t let it be closed for more than a week.”

Hardy said she has volunteered to work an extra day at the station in Aguila because Christmas falls on Friday. That way the locals can dump their holiday heave-hos, and maybe the whole problem won’t come around again on the gee-tar.