Eastern KY residents fight proposed mega landfill project at abandoned mine site
Tensions are rising in an Eastern Kentucky community over whether the county government will permit construction of a 450-acre, privately owned and operated landfill on an abandoned surface mine.
Residents near the former Premier Elkhorn mine near Myra in Pike County say they are concerned about health and environmental risks if their community plays host to a mega-landfill site that would accept waste by rail and truck from surrounding areas in at least three states.
The Pike County Fiscal Court entered into a host agreement late last month with USA Waste and Recycling to explore whether the mine is suitable for construction of a landfill that could store up to 170 million cubic yards of trash. A USA affiliate signed an option agreement with the mine reclamation firm that owns the site Dec. 31.
The county is one of only a handful in Kentucky that owns and operates its own landfill, but officials say that operation on Ford Mountain, near Meta, is reaching capacity.
State grants have expanded the facility at least twice now since devastating Eastern Kentucky floods overburdened it with wreckage in 2022 and 2025, but future expansions would be too costly, says Judge-Executive Ray Jones.
“The only way to contain your garbage bill is to partner with a private company,” Jones said. “It’s the only way. That’s why only six of 120 counties have them.”
A mine with a rocky past
The Premier mine complex on Shelby Creek in Pike County has had a rocky history since TECO Energy bought and began developing the property in the early 1990s.
TECO abruptly dumped its coal-mining assets in late 2015, leaving the fate of hundreds of employees and a mine producing more than 4 million tons of coal annually up in the air. Cambrian Coal snagged the mine in a sale of property in Perry County and neighboring Buchannan County, Virginia, but production dwindled to less than a million tons annually by 2019 and Cambrian filed for bankruptcy.
A locally formed firm purchased the mine as part of the bankruptcy estate sale in September 2019, but defaulted on its bonding obligations to its insurance company, which acquired the title in 2024. Last year, a reclamation firm bought the insurance company’s mine assets and immediately began negotiating with a USA affiliate to redevelop it as a landfill.
“Its beautiful, mountainous terrain,” said Ray Ratliff, a community organizer who lives in Ashcamp, a few miles southeast of the proposed landfill. “The community is like a close-knit family.”
That family is worried about the smell and mess a landfill would create. Abandoned coal mines are fragile, damaged ecosystems prone to leaching harmful toxins into surface and groundwater resources. The Premier and Cambrian mine complexes sit about 1,000 feet up a mountain immediately downstream of larger communities like Virgie, Robinson Creek, Shelbiana and, eventually, the county seat and regional economic center of Pikeville.
“We feel like the county hasn’t been transparent about this,” Ratliff said. “We just suddenly found out that a huge landfill will be built.”
An ‘environmental disaster’ looms
Judge Jones said the county has conducted all of its negotiations with the Connecticut-based USA waste management team publicly and nothing has been finalized.
USA has spent roughly half a million dollars in private engineering costs to determine the feasibility of a landfill there, but there is still work left to be done. Plus, he said, there are environmental and economic considerations that are being left out of the public conversation about the landfill that remain top of mind to him.
Until recently, the county was actively pursuing yet another expansion project of the Ford Mountain landfill. Initial estimates put the price tag of that project somewhere around $1.4 million. But the expansion would involve moving 177,000 cubic yards of waste at the toe of the landfill to the top and building a 70-foot-tall berm further down a mountain valley.
That is a dangerous, costly maneuver, the judge said. Done wrong, and the slope could collapse.
“If you have a failure of the slope, it could be economically catastrophic and an environmental disaster.”
The latest estimates of the project are closer to $18 million, which Jones said Pike County’s declining population, much of which is on a fixed income, simply cannot afford.
“Don’t shoot the messenger,” Jones told members of the public who attended a special-called fiscal court session Feb. 16 to discuss the landfill project, “but listen to the message.”
