STARKVILLE – The Starkville-Oktibbeha landfill near the intersection of Rockhill and Butler roads, after more than a decade, will officially be remediated and closed for good.
The board of aldermen at its regular meeting Tuesday approved its half of a more than $2.1 million bid it received to close the landfill. The Oktibbeha County Board of Supervisors approved funding the other half of the project earlier this month.
“You’re always pleased to get another to-do item off your list, and in this case, this is one of those that has been pending for much longer than I would have liked,” Mayor Lynn Spruill told The Dispatch. “… We’re just glad that … we could get it managed and get it closed out, and perhaps get it to a point where it will serve a different purpose at some time in the not too distant future.”
     Lynn Spruill   The roughly 15-acre landfill, which is overseen by the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, first ceased operations in 2016 after the city self-reported that garbage had begun to extend past the landfill’s established boundaries. After receiving a new permit from MDEQ, the landfill resumed operations in March 2017, before reaching its capacity in 2018 and ceasing operations.
Since then, the city has used the Golden Triangle Regional Landfill on Old West Point Road to hold its garbage.
After submitting remediation plans to MDEQ in 2019, the board received approval to proceed earlier this year and began taking bids for the remediation work. That work includes relocating waste back into the landfill’s boundaries, leveling slopes and compacting it all, then “capping” it all under a two-foot layer of permeable soil.
Spruill said the remediation work for the landfill could begin in the next two months.
To build funds for the landfill’s closure, the board raised sanitation fees in 2019 by $1.50 for residential pick-up and $5 for commercial pick-up. Those funds were earmarked for the landfill’s remediation and placed into an escrow account.
Ward 2 Alderwoman Sandra Sistrunk said the escrow had grown to roughly $1.4 million in September.
The county is covering its half of the project from ad valorem taxes that previously went to servicing debt on the OCH Regional Medical Center.
Since the county sold the hospital – and offloaded that debt – to Baptist Memorial Health Care in August 2025, it had surplus funds to apply to the project.
Beyond covering the city’s half of the remediation costs, any additional funds in the city’s escrow account are expected to cover any surprise costs that pop up during the project, Sistrunk said.
Once the landfill project is complete, any remaining funds will be used for “one-time projects” for the city’s sanitation department, Sistrunk said.
     Sandra Sistrunk   “So I would anticipate them being used for … a vehicle purchase or a building rehab or something like that,” she said.
After the landfill is closed and sits capped for a year, the site could potentially be redeveloped into something like a walking trail, a drone field or a solar site. Spruill said she expects the board to revisit those ideas when the time comes.
“I think that there are multiple potential options,” Spruill said. “… I think we need to visit that when we get it completed and when we have a decent idea of what it will look like.”
Columbus landfill
Over in Columbus, a similar issue persists with the city’s landfill off Armstrong Road.
The 23-acre property, which the city leases from private landowners, has served as a dumpsite for rubbish and construction waste for more than 30 years before being closed to the public in 2024 for maintenance.
Usage at the site has dropped drastically since 2014, when it took in 28,000 tons, due to customers finding other places to dispose of that waste. In 2025, the city’s landfill accepted only 3,385 tons of waste.
On average, the landfill costs the city about $150,000 annually.
At its five-year average tonnage rate of about 6,800 annually, City Engineer Kevin Stafford said at a March work session that the landfill “theoretically” had 1.94 years of useful life. To obtain a more solid number, the city needed to commission a topographical survey.
The landfill does not accept household garbage and earlier this year began to accept only waste collected by the city’s Public Works department. Additional garbage is taken to the regional center near West Point.
The city has remained steadfast in only permitting dumpage of public works waste since that time, Ward 6 Councilman Jason Spears said.
Stafford said that after conducting a topographical survey earlier this year of the landfill, the site actually has about 11 years of useful life left if it continues to only accept waste from the public works department. Though that is largely dependent on projected annual tonnage remaining unaffected.
     Kevin Stafford   “Landfill life is very dependent on what comes in,” Stafford wrote in a text to The Dispatch. “One storm and it could be out of space.”
Stafford said an early estimate placed the landfill’s closure and capping at more than $2 million, but that cost could deviate as the city works on designs and receives bids for the project.
Spears, who chairs the city’s finance committee, said he believes Columbus could take a similar approach to Starkville by raising funds and creating an escrow account to help build funding, but he isn’t sure what exactly that revenue source could be.
As far as continuing to use the regional center or developing a new Columbus landfill, Spears said it is still too early to decide the better plan.
     Jason Spears   “It will definitely be something that we have to evaluate where those particular funds will come from, and how we’ll be able to tackle that particular project,” Spears said. “… There hasn’t been much action taken toward setting funds aside or the road forward as to what we need to do. So I do think (there) will be more discussion that we will need to have this year.”