JEFFERSON COUNTY, Ohio

The Jefferson County Commission is explaining why it's not acting on a request to restructure debt for Apex Landfill.

The Columbiana County Port Authority came to the county commissioner meeting last week to request a restructuring of debt for the landfill. But Commissioner Tom Gentile said the commission decided to table that request until further notice.

"They've been working for some time now on restructuring their debt. And it particularly works through the Columbiana County Port Authority," Gentile said. "They did need the Jefferson County Commissioners to sign off on that and we tabled it last week."

Jefferson County Commissioner Tom Gentile said they're holding off for a very simple reason.

"It's not uncommon in some months to have up to 170 odor complaints in a month," Gentile said. "I talked to Pam Allen from the Ohio EPA a while back to urge them and I got them out here and they came to the conclusion that it wasn't an intermittent problem; it was a constant problem."

Gentile said that they are trying to find out how much money they would save by restructuring their debt. They also want to know how much was going toward correcting the problem.

"Is there a possibility that this place could close down because of their debt? How much debt are we talking about?" Gentile said. "I don't think that's it they have other options to restructure the debt, but again it's going to cost a lot of money legally to prepare all the documents, to do all of that and they say it could take about 10 months to do it. So we're not sure the balls in their court but we said until you can give us some something in writing that demonstrates these savings are going to go directly toward helping our residents then we're not willing to sign."

A media representative with Apex has yet to comment.