On Tuesday night, Logan City Council members unanimously agreed: It's time to take the trash out - all the way out of Cache Valley.

Logan officials approved, 5-0, a resolution making the city the newest member of a multi-county agency, the Northern Utah Regional Landfill Authority. The City of Logan is the contractor for waste collection and disposal for all of Cache County.

Weber, Davis, Morgan and, most importantly, Box Elder counties are also making plans to join the regional authority's efforts to site, construct, operate and maintain a shared landfill that will be one of the largest waste facilities in the state, according to Logan City Environmental Director Issa Hamud.

In 2005, Logan's then-Mayor Doug Thompson agreed to commit $20,000, or one quarter of the total cost of a site search. Box Elder has been identified as the most likely location because 5,600 square miles of land, plus 2,200 square miles of Great Salt Lake, are contained in the county boundaries.

In Cache County, hopes are high that the proposal to haul all of the county's rubbish out of the valley will be the answer to the landfill shortage expected in 2020, when the current site west of Logan is filled to the brim.

Logan began looking for a site for a new landfill in 1999. The search ended with the city's purchase of nearly 400-acre parcel in Clarkston, but residents of the rural town made such a stink about the proposed landfill that Hamud vowed to look for an alternative.

"It [the regional landfill] would save money just because of the size of the project," Hamud said. "Transportation costs from here to the site would be more, but we would probably save that much by combining [multi-county] resources at one site."

Logan Mayor Randy Watts, as well as the Solid Waste Advisory Board and Citizens' Advisory Board, also have voiced support for the proposal.

"The council believes that it is in the best interests of the citizens it serves to develop additional landfill, and possibly other solid waste facilities to meet future ever-expanding needs for waste disposal in the county," Tuesday's resolution states. "The council also believes it would be a more efficient and effective use of resources to join with other public agencies to plan for and meet the solid waste disposal needs of these collective agencies."

abrunson@sltrib.com