HANCOCK COUNTY – Fuel prices lately have been especially painful if you oversee a fleet of trash trucks that run on diesel and get low gas mileage. Just ask Kent Fisk, owner of Fisk Waste Removal in Greenfield.
“It’s going to be a hold-onto-your-socks year,” he said.
The persisting high gas prices are resulting in about a $500-a-day increase on his business.
“It’s been horrible for us,” Fisk said.
The company is just one entity in Hancock County that relies heavily on transportation feeling the pinch at the pump after gas prices soared to over $5 a gallon earlier this year and remain over $4.
Fisk said his business doesn’t raise customers’ rates more than once a year.
“So it’s going to take us a while to work everything in,” he said of building finances back up.
He expects it to take over a year to increase rates enough to cover fuel.
And while gas prices are a struggle, Fisk Waste Removal faces other economic challenges too, like containers that have doubled in price, securing enough labor and having customers experiencing trouble paying bills.
“I don’t think we’re going to see any relief soon,” Fisk said. “We’re definitely not going to make any money for a year or two, so you just basically try to get employees paid and you try to get the bills paid as much as you can and hope you can break even at the end of the time.”
He recalled similarly bad years over a decade ago following the Great Recession.
“Same thing – people can’t pay their bill and everything gets tight, but the amount of trash doesn’t seem to flow down,” he said.
The Hancock County Sheriff’s Department goes through about 8,500 to 9,000 gallons of fuel a month, according to Sheriff Brad Burkhart.
When he works on his fuel budget for the upcoming year, he bases it on gas prices at the time. Gas prices were about $3.10 a gallon as he prepared his 2022 numbers last year. Then came 2022’s climb.
“Your budget goes pretty quickly when that happens,” Burkhart said
His $250,000 fuel coffer for 2022 has plummeted to $44,000, leaving him needing an additional appropriation from the Hancock County Council to get through the rest of the year. In his 12 years as chief deputy and then sheriff, it’s the first time he’s seen a shortfall in the department’s fuel budget.
The city of Greenfield seeks bids every year for its police department’s fuel, which is currently provided by Harvest Land Co-op.
Greenfield Police Chief Brian Hartman recalled that the GPD increased its budget this year by $15,000 for gas, oil and tires.
“We still have over 50% left in this line item and we are beyond halfway through the year,” he told the Daily Reporter in an email. “I feel we are in good shape at this point.”
Current prices have him and his counterparts in city government thinking cautiously about 2023.
“We are in the middle of budget hearings now and all departments in the city including the police department are looking at the impact that this rise in fuel cost could have on us next year and are preparing to budget accordingly,” Hartman said.
Suzanne Derengowski, executive director of Hancock County Senior Services and Hancock Area Rural Transit, said the transit service has about seven to eight vehicles on the road on any given day providing about 50 to 80 rides a day.
“The good news is that we as an agency have been pretty proactive in our budgeting,” she said. “We did not, however, plan for over $5-a-gallon gas.”
To weather the storm, the service has been implementing strategies like ride-sharing.
“We have scheduling software that allows us to tighten things up a little bit and really work on our efficiency,” Derengowski said.
Gas prices have been hard on recreational vehicle sales as well.
Ken Eckstein, owner of Mount Comfort RV in Hancock County, said the rates are just one of several factors impacting the industry.
“I think short-term, we’re going to get slapped in the face,” he said. “We’ve got the perfect storm of rising interest rates, rising gas prices, falling stock market, falling consumer confidence. I mean, that’s the perfect storm, and it’s going to hurt the RV industry a lot.”
But his line of work is cyclical, he said before recalling the upward trend that started before the COVID-19 pandemic, which he attributed much of to increasing interest from a younger demographic.
“When times are good, you always throw away acorns,” Eckstein said. “You know winter’s coming. You know that you’re going to have those down spots. You always want to see the air getting let out of the balloon slowly. But our industry has a history of parachute drops. When we come off a high, we come down hard. And you just want to make sure your parachute’s big enough to guarantee a soft landing.”
