March 1, 2025
VIROQUA, Wis. — Starting this month, Viroqua’s household garbage will travel roughly 120 miles to a private facility near Eau Claire after the Common Council approved changes to its waste‑hauling contract, citing an airspace crisis at the Vernon County landfill.
The council voted unanimously Tuesday, Feb. 10 following a closed session to amend and extend its agreement with GFL Environmental Inc. through the end of 2028. The move ends Viroqua’s practice of sending municipal solid waste to the county‑owned landfill outside Viroqua.
Beginning March 1, GFL will not only collect the city’s trash and recyclables, but will also haul the garbage to a company facility in the Eau Claire area and cover disposal, or tipping, fees as part of a single bundled rate.
County landfill squeezed for space
Torres said the shift is driven primarily by conditions at the county facility, which has been warning for months that it is nearly out of permitted capacity and may have to stop accepting waste for burial while pursuing a major expansion.
“They have at this point filed paperwork for the Vernon County landfill to actually just become a transfer station,” City Administrator Nate Torres told the council during the open portion of the meeting. “They are talking about making that change as soon as possible because they are running out of airspace.”
Under a plan presented this week to the Vernon County Infrastructure Committee, Solid Waste Director Stacie Sanborn outlined an emergency strategy to peel back thick layers of “intermediate” soil cover on parts of the existing landfill to reclaim buried capacity while the county waits for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources to act on an expansion request.
“If we take the soil off and fill it with waste, we’re recapturing this 18,000 cubic yards,” Sanborn told county officials. “But it’s buried.”
Sanborn warned that without digging up that cover, the landfill could hit its limit and have to stop taking garbage.
“If we make no effort to recover this airspace, we will be closing,” she said. “We filled 18,000 cubic yards of dirt instead of garbage that could have generated revenue.”
Torres told Viroqua council members that even under the county’s best‑case timeline, it could be about two years before a new landfill cell is ready to accept waste, and that in the meantime the county expects to function essentially as a transfer station — accepting garbage, then hauling it out of county at added cost.
“They really can’t take our trash at this point,” Torres said. “It would actually cost us significantly more, because now they’re not the end line — there’s trucking fees and other tipping fees that we would have to pay after that.”
From split costs to a single rate
Viroqua’s original three‑year contract with GFL, which began in 2024, only covered curbside collection. The city paid GFL to pick up garbage and recyclables, then separately paid the Vernon County landfill to bury the waste at a per‑ton tipping rate.
In late 2025, the county raised that tipping fee to $65 per ton, a $5 increase that Torres said created an unbudgeted shortfall. In response, city staff opened talks with GFL about using a built‑in two‑year extension on the hauling contract and restructuring how disposal costs are handled.
Under the amended agreement, GFL’s per‑household charge will now include both collection and disposal, with the company assuming responsibility for where and how the waste is landfilled.
“They are recommending eight dollars and sixty cents for garbage and four dollars and seventy‑five cents for recycling,” Torres said as he walked the council through GFL’s proposal. “The tipping fee is now integrated into the garbage collection cost.”
Torres said that once the higher county tipping fee and expected transfer‑station costs are fully factored in, the bundled GFL rate is roughly in line with, or better than, what the city would otherwise pay to continue using the county facility.
GFL representative Mike Lange told the council the company’s offer would hold costs steady over the short term.
“We lock the pricing in for the next three years, including this year as well, for the duration of the extension,” Lange said. “You guys are going to be saving money going this route versus having to take the waste to the Vernon County landfill.”
Walking away from a county deal
Tension over landfill costs and control has been building for months. In September 2025, Vernon County officials asked Viroqua to sign a five‑year disposal agreement that would have kept city waste going to the county landfill but allowed the county to adjust tipping rates at its sole discretion.
Mayor Justin Running and the council balked, arguing the city would be locking itself into an arrangement without guaranteed savings or predictable long‑term pricing.
“It is us signing a contract to continue getting what we are getting, with them having the ability to go ahead and change [rates] at any point,” Running said during the September discussion. “I think getting into a contract that doesn’t give us a defined multi‑year financial plan — there is no benefit.”
Torres at the time urged the city to protect its ability to negotiate.
“I think it is important that the city not willingly give up flexibility,” he told the council. “I wouldn’t want to give that up.”
The amended GFL deal effectively formalizes that stance. One of the key changes is the removal of a clause in the original hauling contract that required GFL to dispose of Viroqua’s waste at the Vernon County landfill. With that language stripped, GFL is free to take the garbage to its own network of facilities, starting with the site near Eau Claire.
Terms of the new arrangement
Under the action taken Tuesday, the city’s contract with GFL now runs through Dec. 31, 2028. The structure is:
- 2024–2026: original three‑year term, with 2026 pricing amended mid‑year.
- 2027–2028: two‑year extension at the escalated rates spelled out in the amendment.
The new pricing and disposal terms take effect March 1, 2026, not at the start of the 2027 extension period.
Under the city’s previous hauling contract with GFL Environmental, residents paid a fractured rate that separated the collection of the trash from the actual disposal. Households paid $5.00 per month for garbage collection and $4.50 for recycling collection. However, the city also paid a separate “tipping fee” to dispose of the garbage at the Vernon County Landfill, which was passed along to residents at a rate of about $3.40 per household each month
Under the new agreement, households will pay $8.60 per month for garbage and $4.75 for recycling. While the base collection fee is noticeably higher, it completely absorbs the tipping costs that the city previously paid to the county
After about an hour of public discussion and a closed‑session, the council returned to open session and adopted the amended terms and two‑year extension on a unanimous voice vote.
Eau Claire is just a hair over 100 miles from Viroqua. So a 200 mile drive to EC would have to include either some very poor route planning, or an extremely confused driver.