Suzanne Stewart
Staff Writer
Twenty years ago, Jacob Meck Construction’s owner and namesake met with Dr. John Sharp at his clinic in Green Bank to discuss a possible construction job for the company. When he left the office, Meck didn’t have a construction job, but he was offered a chance to buy County Disposal from Sharp and his business partner, Jim Burks.
“It was kind of an off-hand comment,” Meck recalled. “It’s just one of those things – I went in to talk about some construction and then as I was leaving, he’s like, ‘you want to buy this company out?’”
Jacob Meck Construction was a County Disposal customer, using rolloffs on construction sites. The Mecks had just started a porta john company because they needed porta johns on their worksites, so Meck and his wife/business partner, accepted the offer and changed the business name to Allegheny Disposal.
“It was basically a three truck, three driver company,” Meck said. “They had an office manager down there; we ran the company from Campbelltown for two years.”
The Mecks are the third owners of County Disposal which was founded in the mid-1980s by John and Kathy Owens, around the time of the 1985 flood. This was also around the same time the county landfill was built.
“The Owens started it; secured the certificate of need in the early eighties,” Meck said. “They ran it for a number of years and then sold it to Jim and Doc. Then we purchased it from them.”
Allegheny Disposal offers three services – residential hand pickup, dumpster rentals and roll off rentals. The company has 250 trash customers.
“We spend three days a week picking up for 250 people,” Meck said.
Those who don’t use Allegheny Disposal use the green boxes provided by the Solid Waste Authority. Pocahontas County is the only county in West Virginia with a green box system.
“The green box system was a really good idea,” Meck said. “Virginia uses it in all kinds of counties and why in the world West Virginia hasn’t done more, I don’t know.”
“That was Ed Riley’s brainchild,” Malinda Meck added.
One of the first projects the Mecks took on when they bought the company was to find a way to make their dumpsters bear proof. It took some time and a lot of fabrication, but they managed to make a latch system that has been successful.
“We probably have bear proof dumpers at at least half of the locations in the three counties we serve,” Jacob said.
“We worked in depth with Jody Spencer to learn how a bear thinks,” Malinda said. “Jody helped us quite a bit on that because he was with the DNR. At that time, if you had a bear issue, he would move them. Cully McCurdy helped us, too.”
The latch system allows customers to pull a lever to open the dumpster and lock the door back in place so bears cannot access the trash.
As Meck and his crew worked on the latch system, it became quite the community project, with visitors to the office offering input or ideas that might work.
“We had so many different designs,” Meck said. “What we started with and what we have is way, way different. It was kind of neat when we were working on it, it wasn’t uncommon for someone to stop in and ask what we were doing. You’d have people who’d look at it for a few minutes and were like, ‘did you think about doing this?’
“It was almost a collaboration.”
In the past 20 years, the company has grown from three to five trucks and serves customers in Pocahontas and Greenbrier counties in West Virginia, as well as Highland and Bath counties in Virginia.
After the landfill in Highland County was closed, Meck was asked to take over the trash services there. The Mecks built up and replaced equipment at the five collection locations in the county and all the trash from there goes to the Augusta County landfill which, coincidentally, is operated by Pocahontas County native Cole Seldomridge.
“They had an agreement with the Augusta landfill which is on the south side of Staunton,” Meck said. “It takes 500 tons a day. They have stop lights at the face. When you pull up, you wait in a queue and when it turns green, you go out on the face. That’s a massive landfill. Cole does an excellent job.”
The landfill only serves Augusta County and takes the Highland County trash due to an agreement the two counties made after the Highland landfill closed.
In their 20 years of operating Allegheny Disposal, the Mecks have witnessed several landfills closing like the one in Highland County. Counties around Pocahontas County, Randolph, in West Virginia, and Bath and Alleghany in Virginia have all closed, as well.
Meck said he has seen it become more common for regional landfills to be used by multiple counties or for transfer stations to be built instead of landfills.
This has been an ongoing discussion in Pocahontas County as the landfill in Dunmore reaches the end of its lifespan.
In the meantime, the Mecks said they want to assure their customers that Allegheny Disposal will continue to provide the services it has for the past 20 years.
To learn more about Allegheny Disposal and its services, please visit the website, https://www.alleghenydisposal.com/
