The waste tire program has gone from having a $6.4 million surplus in the 1998-99 fiscal year to holding just $325,522 as of December, according to an analysis by the legislative number-crunchers.
The fund, replenished monthly by a consumer fee on new tires, may not be enough to cover the costs of processors who recycle the tires, Department of Environmental Quality Secretary Hal Bohlinger said.
Under the program, processors pay transporters to collect used tires. The tires then are then recycled and sold as raw material. The state then pays the processors -- there are four in Louisiana -- $1.50 for each 20 pounds of processed tire or $150 a ton to recycle the tires. The processors can then sell the rubber on the open market, either as raw material for fuel or for civil engineering uses such as making asphalt.
The tire fund is fueled by a fee consumers pay when they buy new tires: $2 per car tire, $5 per medium-sized truck tire and $10 per off-road truck tire. As well as paying for the recycling of worn-out tires, the money has been used over the years to clean up unauthorized tire piles around the state.
Bohlinger blamed the financial crunch on used tires brought in from Texas and other surrounding states. Only Louisiana tires are eligible for the program, but Bohlinger told the Joint Environmental Committee that he thinks documentation is being altered to pass off out-of-state tires.
"That's against the law," said Sen. James David Cain, R-Dry Creek, chairman of the Senate's environmental panel.
Dennis Richard of the Independent Tire Dealers Association, which represents new tire dealers, said state officials should have noticed the influx of tires from out of state in their own public records. He found that in the town of Campti, north of Natchitoches, with a population of 929, a used tire store sent an average of 3,622 truck tires and 1,783 passenger tires to a processor each month for about 11 months.
That would make that store one of the largest tire retailers in the country, he said.
The heads of processing companies told the committee that they reported the unusually large number of tires coming into their plants to the DEQ about a year ago.
But Thomas Bickham, DEQ's undersecretary of management and finance, said the agency ascribed some of the rise in cost to a $50-per-ton increase in the fees paid to processors, as well as regulation changes that allowed processors to accept tires from used tire dealers.
To combat the problem, DEQ officials said they issued a new regulation last week mandating that used-tire dealers keep records, which will be audited by an outside company. Times-Picayune (Louisiana)