By Soncirey Mitchell
Reader Staff
After several years of planning, the Bonner County Board of Commissioners voted unanimously April 14 to purchase software and card readers for its 11 staffed solid waste collection sites, allowing users to pay fees with debit or credit cards. The sites will continue to accept cash and checks.
Though the issue of card readers has been raised in multiple public workshops over the past few years, Fiscal Year 2026 is the first time Bonner County Solid Waste has had the budget to purchase card software. The county entered into a three-year contract with Stellar ScaleTech for a one-time fee of $30,300, plus an annual subscription fee of $21,760. The system will process payments, generate reports, create customer receipts and invoices and “improve accuracy and commodity tracking,” according to Solid Waste Operations Manager Melissa Gault. Currently, site attendants manually write receipts.
The county has yet to negotiate with accepted credit card companies for the user fee, which will be between 3%-5%. When asked what the return on investment will be for the county, Commissioner Asia Williams stated that “it’s more of a service to the public” that users have been requesting for years.
“What we did was, we did evaluate the fact that we’re only able to take cash at the locations,” said Williams. “And so it wasn’t just a return on investment, it was also a safety and security [measure], and then addressing the people’s concern about taking cash without having the cards to be able to slide.”
Multiple solid waste sites have been broken into after hours over the past few years, with thieves making off with the petty cash used for change or collected during operations. In these instances, the county has had to open the budget to replenish cash reserves and pay for any property damage incurred during the theft.
The Stellar ScaleTech system is an integral step in Solid Waste’s capital improvement efforts, helping the county better track site usage. In the next few years, the county plans to consider additional systems that would allow residents to pay different rates for dump usage.
“I think it’d be great if we can scale the cost to the volume of use so that people are paying for their actual use,” said BOCC Chair Brian Domke. “And again, we’re trying to reduce subsidizing the cost of others.”
