The City of Algona may remain at the top of King County’s list of alternative sites for a new transfer station.

But as far as Mayor Dave Hill is concerned, negotiations between his city and the county over building a new site on 18.9 acres at 35101 W. Valley Highway S., north of the present station, are nowhere.

“We have severed all talks,” Hill told the Auburn Reporter in late December. “The county has not been proceeding in good faith.”

The Algona Transfer Station, like many of King County’s solid waste transfer stations, was built in the mid-1960s and is now outdated, over-capacity and lacks space to provide recycling services. A regional, multi-year planning effort that resulted in the Solid Waste Transfer and Waste Management Plan led King County to decide to replace the Algona station with a new recycling and transfer station in the South King County area.

The other top possibilities for the transfer and recycling station are at 901 C St. SW, near the City of Auburn’s Maintenance and Operations yard east of The Outlet Collection Mall, and at 28721 W. Valley Highway S. in north Auburn.

Hill recounted 18 months of negotiations between King County and the City of Algona that he said had been approaching a hopeful place where the two sides could start talking about drawing up an inter-local agreement, a document that lays out respective obligations.

But there was a sticking point.

In this case it was money — specifically what the county would be willing to do to mitigate or financially compensate the City of Algona for a project that would take public property off the tax rolls while presenting no money to the City to cover the loss.

A project that would stick the small City with the cost of dealing with the wear and tear on the portion of West Valley Highway that passes through Algona.

That in effect would have the City bear all the burdens and costs of having the station there and receive nothing in return to compensate for it.

“Everybody else would be taxed a bit higher,” Hill said, adding that over the next 50 years removing the property in question from the tax rolls could amount to millions in lost sales tax revenue.

“They wouldn’t budge on that,” Hill said.

King County, he said, offered to reopen talks, but it wanted to open up issues the two sides had already agreed upon in that 18 month span of time.

That was not acceptable to Hill, so he sent a letter to King County breaking off negotiations.

But he is willing to talk.

“They’re going to have to come up with a solution to the issue, put things to us in the form of an offer, but they haven’t so far,” Hill said.

In a recent email to the Auburn Reporter, Doug Williams, media relations coordinator for King County’s Department of Natural Resources and Parks, said he couldn’t “comment further on the siting process while we’re still in discussions with property owners.”

Here is what King County’s website has to say:

“The King County Solid Waste Division is in the process of discussing mitigation strategies with the City of Algona that would address the minor potential environmental impacts anticipated, and would allow the County to site the new station next to the existing station. These discussions are productive and ongoing.”