Where did 16,000 tons come from?

The president of a company that dumped more than 16,000 tons of debris at the publicly owned Franklin County landfill, while avoiding $700,000 in tipping fees, said last week the company had the right to do it because the trash came out of yard waste processed at its Groveport mulch facility.

But based on the amount of yard waste that records show Kurtz Brothers collected for the Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio at that site in 2015 and 2016, it would have taken up to 50 years to accumulate that

much trash from the leaves, grass and branches that it processed. That’s according to Kurtz Brother’s President Thomas Kurtz’s estimate that about 1 percent of yard waste it collects is actually trash that got mixed into the yard waste.

That would mean that the more than 16,000 tons of debris — transported in more than 800 truckloads — that Kurtz Brothers dumped for free between July 2016 and February 2017, would have started piling up at its Groveport site around 1967. Back then, nobody was recycling yard waste there. SWACO started paying Kurtz Brothers millions of dollars in 1996 to recycle yard waste under a contract that has been extended without competitive bidding ever since.

That contract, Kurtz said, gives the company the right to dump yard-waste debris for free.

SWACO Executive Director Ty Marsh said he doesn’t know why his predecessors at the agency agreed to pay two companies — Kurtz Brothers and Ohio Mulch — to accept and process yard waste into mulch.

“I think there were different theories” about why SWACO pays companies to take yard waste, Marsh said. The agency has been under different management since 2013.

Kurtz Brothers’ payments are capped. The firm currently receives $1.2 million a year to collect more than 90,000 tons of yard waste at three sites.

Ohio Mulch was paid $285,000 under its cap in 2016 to take in about 177,000 tons, about one-eighth of what Kurtz Brothers got per ton. Ohio Mulch owner Jim Weber said he would take the material for free because his company makes a profit from the yard waste by turning it into mulch and selling it.

Taxpayers are locked into the Kurtz Brothers contract until at least 2022.

Kurtz Brothers was represented since 2003 by John Raphael, now serving time in federal prison for extorting campaign contributions for Columbus officials from the city’s red-lightcamera vendor. Kurtz has said Raphael played no role in negotiating the SWACO contracts and extensions.

Kurtz has said that the surge in free dumping was a result of the sale of its Groveport mulching facility, which is being redeveloped into warehouses. That site was cleared of everything, including almost 7,000 square feet of industrial structures that county records still show as being at the site.

Neither the Groveport Building and Zoning Department nor the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency has any records showing that Kurtz Brothers secured demolition permits before the buildings disappeared.

“They never came in to apply for a permit,” a requirement of the Ohio Building Code, said Stephan Moore, chief building official for Groveport. He intends to determine who did the demolition and send a letter inquiring why a permit wasn’t obtained, he said.

The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency has no record of a “notification of demolition” application, required for “every demolition of a facility,” according to the application. Failing to do so can result in civil penalties, said James Lee, Ohio EPA spokesman.

Kurtz earlier said he didn’t know what happened to the buildings. He did not return a telephone call left with the firm’s Dublin office for this story.

The land in question is 36 acres at 2850 Rohr Road in what has grown into a sprawling industrial park. VanTrust Real Estate purchased it from Kurtz Brothers for more than $4 million in January 2016, said Andrew Weeks, executive vice president of VanTrust. Weeks said nothing that Kurtz Brothers disposed of for free in the landfill was owned by VanTrust.

“We purchased the land and the seller had the obligation to clear the site,” Weeks said. “They had to clear the site by June 1 of this year.”

Kurtz earlier estimated that about 1 percent of the yard waste his firm receives under its SWACO contract is really trash. Ohio Mulch owner Jim Weber estimates the amount to be about 1.5 percent. Either way, it would have taken decades to accumulate that much trash from yard waste at the Groveport site.

SWACO records show Kurtz collected an average of 32,000 tons of yard waste a year at the Groveport site in 2015 and 2016, which would produce an estimated few hundred tons of trash for free disposal each year. That’s about 17 truckloads — or roughly what Kurtz Brothers was dumping in an hour and a half on some days this winter, when SWACO’s records show the firm’s activity peaked.