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LATONIA, Ky. — A northern Kentucky waste removal company is moving forward with plans to upgrade a facility in Latonia. Some neighboring businesses, however, have complained about the impact the company has had since taking over its current facility, including odor, traffic and trash.

This solid waste transfer station at 4933 Boron Drive in Latonia has been there for over 40 years.

In the summer of 2020, the city of Covington awarded operation of the facility to Rumpke Waste & Recycling. That’s when David Von Bokern, owner of Davon Auto just down the road from the transfer station, said he started noticing an increase in traffic and odor.

“The volume has been much, much more since Rumpke’s taken over,” Von Bokern said. “The smell is horrible on the warm days when the wind’s blowing this way.”

He said he’s often seen nails on the street, and trash on his lawn.

“I don’t think that it [was] a good move for the city to turn this over to Rumpke,” Von Bokern said.

Davon Auto is a complete automotive service shop, which has been at 4343 Boron Drive for four years.

Rumpke has existed for 90 years. Its headquarters is in Colerain Township, but the company serves much of Northern Kentucky. When Covington Public Works moved out of an adjacent building on the site in Latonia in July, Rumpke took over full operation of the site, allowing it to move forward with plans.

Von Bokern said the Latonia transfer station smells like a dump.

But a transfer station is meant to be a place trash goes before the dump, as Rumpke Corporate Communications Manager Molly Yeaer explained.

“It’s essentially a place you take waste or recycling until you can take it to a landfill or to a recycling facility. So basically, you’re consolidating trash you collect, or recycling you collect, and then loading it into a larger truck,” Yeaer said.

Fellow neighboring business Blair Technologies, which has been operating in a building next to the transfer station since 2013, has also expressed concerns since Rumpke took over.

“The traffic seems like it’s ten times what it was prior to their arrival. This dump brings trash from the entire northern Kentucky area, not just Covington. Anyone and everyone is bringing whatever they want to this dump with no controls. Their loads spill out all over the roads and areas,” said CEO Andy Blair. “It’s shocking that Covington insists on having this dump here in Latonia.”

Blair said he has seen little to no clean up attempted.  

“Our property constantly has trash from them that we pay to clean up. We have at least five employees a week complain of screws in their tires. The rats are New Your City-size mutants,” he said. “We used to have a problem with stray cats, but those were better than the rats.”

Rats in the warehouse have raised health concerns for his employees. And Blair said he thinks more limits should be placed on who can dump at the site.

“We were unaware that this was an ongoing issue. So we are working now to address any issue that our neighbors have. It is our goal to be invisible at the property line. We don’t want to ever be a burden on our neighbors,” Yeaer said.

The city of Covington met with officials from Blair and Rumpke earlier this year to discuss these issues, during which Rumpke pledged to take corrective action. 

As part of its bid to operate the site, Rumpke submitted plans to demolish the current transfer station, and build a new one on the same grounds but further away from its neighbors. The company will rehabilitate the former Public Works building to use for its maintenance facilities and offices. The new transfer station will be built in the section that has buildings formerly occupied by the Kenton County Fire Department.

Covington’s Board of Architectural Review approved a conditional use permit (CUP) at its 9/17/2022 public hearing. The vote was 5-1 to allow Rumpke’s plans to move forward. The approved CUP legally establishes the waste transfer facility. The facility was previously operating on City-owned land without a zoning permit, because Covington does not require itself to seek zoning permits. There is a contract to sell, but there hasn’t been a closing yet, according to the city of Covington.

The conditions for the BOARD to approve a CUP are listed in Section 07.23.2 of the Covington Neighborhood Development Code.

Yeaer said additional bays will help ease traffic. Currently, every truck has to pass through weight scales, which causes traffic backups. The company plans to adjust where those are located.

Yeaer said the company is also working to address odor and pests. The new facility being more enclosed will help with those issues, she said. The company is contracting a sweeper truck to clean up roads. All of the moves are aimed at being a good neighbor, she said.

However, Von Bokern said he needs to see it to believe it. He said he asked about the volume of trash, and where it was coming from, at a council meeting.

“We asked what was the tonnage increase. And they said there wasn’t gonna be any. But we’ve already seen an increase in the amount of garbage that comes through,” he said. “We don’t know where all this garbage is coming from. There’s fluids all over the street. It’s just not good for the city to have a dump site in the middle of the city.”

Rumpke picks up waste and recycling for almost 16,000 households in Covington alone. It’s an essential service Yeaer said will be made more efficient with the new facility, allowing trucks to begin and end their days at the transfer station rather than at Rumpke’s landfill in Pendleton County.

Building that facility up will take a lot of work, as will building back up good will with surrounding companies. Yeaer said Rumpke is confident in its ability to do both.

According to a spokesperson with the city of Covington, “the city has high hopes for the new facility and believe that its design will dramatically improve its operations and setup related to key issues like traffic flow, appearance, safety, citizen convenience, value, and environmental protection.”

Demolition is scheduled to begin in September. Rumpke plans to build in 2023 and open the facility by the end of that year.

Editor's note: In a previous version of this story the reporter identified  Rumpke Corporate Communications Manager Molly Yeaer as Molly Yager. The error has been corrected we we apologize for the error.