Cedar Hills Regional Landfill Permanent Support Facilities

Published September 23, 2022

Increased risk, cost, and potential for service disruptions are likely with King County Solid Waste Division’s (SWD) permanent support facilities project at the Cedar Hills Regional Landfill. First, we found that SWD is unlikely to deliver the permanent support facilities on the current schedule, and delays may increase project costs and could cause disruptions to waste disposal. Second, SWD is not factoring in the uncertainty surrounding new Future of Work initiatives, such as the Re+ plan and landfill life, which will impact facility needs—SWD may be oversizing the permanent support facilities and making decisions that decrease future space flexibility. And finally, we identified areas where SWD could improve project cost transparency. In this letter, we focus on the permanent support facilities project because it is the first project scheduled for construction. We make eight recommendations to SWD to address unresolved challenges and improve transparency of the project schedule and costs.