The Jackson Rubbish Landfill in Byram is set to reopen any day, and when it does, the city will charge by the ton for the first time: $10 a ton for residents, $20 a ton for commercial haulers and anyone from outside the city, according to the ordinance introduced at Tuesday's council meeting and reported by WLBT. The old schedule charged $5 a cubic yard for construction and demolition debris and $1 a tire. A scale is already installed, on the recommendation of Neel-Schaffer Engineering.

WLBT called it a higher price. For a lot of what actually comes through the gate, it is not. The Environmental Protection Agency's standard conversion for mixed construction and demolition debris is 417 pounds per cubic yard, and Florida's regulators, who weighed real loads, measured 484. At those densities, $5 a cubic yard works out to between $21 and $24 a ton. A resident who brings a pickup of torn-out drywall and lumber will pay $10 a ton under the new schedule, less than half the old effective rate. Brush and limbs are lighter still, so the old volume rate charged them the most per pound; by weight they become nearly free.

The commercial rate of $20 a ton lands close to where the old rate already was. So the honest description of the ordinance is this: it moves the cost off residents and onto contractors, and it lowers what the average resident pays. Whether that is good policy depends on a number the city has not published, which is what a ton costs Jackson to bury.

Start with what everyone else charges. The Environmental Research and Education Foundation, which surveys landfills nationally, put the average municipal solid waste tipping fee at $63.48 a ton in 2025. The Southeast averaged about $48. Mississippi, at $31.90 a ton in the foundation's 2024 data, was the cheapest state in the country. Jackson itself pays Waste Management $27.56 a ton to take the city's household garbage to the Clearview Landfill in Lake, according to the city's 2023 solid waste request for proposals, on top of the $891,000 a month it pays Richard's Disposal to collect it. Rankin County paid Waste Management $23.50 a ton in 2022, WLBT reported then.

Those are prices for lined, gas-collecting Class I municipal landfills that take household garbage. Jackson's Byram site is a Class I rubbish site under Mississippi's rules, which take construction debris, limbs, and tires but not garbage. Rubbish sites can rely on natural clay in place of an engineered liner, and the state's own guidance says financial-assurance requirements for their closure are still under review. That makes them cheaper to run, and it is why some governments give the service away: Jackson County on the coast lets residents with a county tag dump at its Seaman Road landfill for free, and Harrison County's Pecan Grove site waives the first 300 pounds.

Cheaper to run is not free to run. What the reopening cost is visible in the council's own record. In March 2025 the council amended the solid waste budget to move money out of equipment purchases and into repairs and professional services, after Public Works told members the landfill had one working tractor and four broken ones, needed a dozer and an excavator on lease-purchase, and still had to build an access road, according to minutes summarized by Citizen Portal. The Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality accepted the construction certification for the new cell in February. Between the old cell filling past its permitted capacity in 2024 and the new one opening, the state also opened corrective actions at the site, MDEQ told WLBT last September.

There is a fourth cost that never shows up on a rubbish site's budget line: the cell that is closing. Landfill closure and post-closure care, the capping, grading, and decades of monitoring that follow, runs $80,000 to $250,000 an acre in industry estimates, or $1 to $8 a ton of waste in present value. A fee that covers the crew and the fuel but sets nothing aside for the cap is a fee that hands the bill to a future council. The last cell is the test case: it reached its permitted capacity in 2024 with no replacement cell ready and no public accounting of what closing it would cost.

So the question the council should be asking is not whether $10 is more or less than $5. It is what the break-even fee is. The formula is simple: annual operating cost, plus the annual set-aside for closing the cell, divided by the tons that come through the gate. Neel-Schaffer recommended the weight-based structure; if the firm also modeled tonnage and cost, that study has not been posted with the ordinance. Without it, nobody outside Public Works can say whether $10 and $20 cover the site or whether the general fund, which the council just balanced with an $8 million cut to Public Works, quietly subsidizes every load.

There is a defensible argument for a subsidy, and it is the illegal dumping argument. When the landfill closed, contractors and residents did not stop generating debris. Brenner Hobbs, a part-owner of Bandit Clean Out Services, told WLBT last September that his crews were repeatedly turned away at Byram, and blamed the closure for the dumping on Jackson's roadsides. Nationally, cleaning up illegally dumped waste costs governments $200 to $600 a ton once labor, equipment, and hauling are counted, according to EPA-cited industry figures. If a cheap gate keeps a ton of debris off a South Jackson lot, the city saves many times what it gave up in fee. That logic supports a low residential rate. It does not support running the site at a loss without knowing the size of the loss.

The cleanest structure is the one most cities use: a solid waste enterprise fund, with the landfill's revenue and costs in their own ledger, a closure reserve funded per ton, and a fee reviewed annually against actual tonnage. Jackson's 2009 solid waste management plan on file with MDEQ describes the city's obligations; it does not describe a reserve. Whether the new ordinance creates one is a question of the ordinance text, which has not been published with the agenda.

What's next: The fee ordinance was introduced Sept. 22 and can be adopted at a subsequent regular council meeting, which puts the vote in October unless it is pulled or amended. The landfill could reopen before the vote, on the old volume-based schedule, since the ordinance only changes the price. Three numbers would settle the too-cheap question, and all three belong to Public Works Director Lorenzo Anderson and the Neel-Schaffer study: the tons the site expects per year, the annual cost to operate it, and the closure and post-closure estimate MDEQ required for the new cell. Those two documents are what to ask the city for before the vote.