Now that the new Solid Waste Governance Board is in place, the focus of Skagit County and its municipal partners must be on the world beyond 2013.

The termination of the present agreement between the county and the cities is just five years away, not all that much time when one considers that we currently have no long-range plan for handling solid waste.

It was a tortuous path that led us to this point.

But for the insistence of two county commissioners on ignoring the will of the cities in the 2004 Solid Waste Comprehensive Plan, we might have started on the crucial planning process years earlier. And we might still have the more simple system consisting of the Solid Waste Advisory Committee, through which the cities previously made their wishes known.

The cities can hardly be blamed for rejecting an advisory committee whose advice is so arbitrarily ignored. The ill will engendered by the commissioners’ overriding the cities’ unanimous support of a single county transfer station led to a near-meltdown in relations between the county and the cities.

It took nearly four years to mend the breach and produce the new governance system for solid waste that gives the cities the kind of say they wanted at the outset.

There are still some difficulties ahead. The county is still fighting two lawsuits related to its rejection of the same contract that Commissioners Ted Anderson and Don Munks adopted after a highly questionable process.

The county declared the contract with Cimarron Transfer and Recycling void after the company couldn’t begin operations on the site for which the permit was issued. A new company, Deluxe Recycling and Disposal, has acquired Cimarron and has continued to press that company’s lawsuit against the county as well as its own legal action.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent in legal costs to defend the lawsuits springing from the recycling contract that never should have been.

Deluxe has chosen to try to muscle its way into the Skagit County solid-waste market through the courts. And it initially found a friendly reception from Sedro-Woolley city officials, who are now faced with a veritable anti-Deluxe uprising by residents, led by the highly respected matriarch of the prominent Janicki family.

We hope that the new governance board can use its authority to bring order to the chaos surrounding the county’s solid-waste planning process.

The board should step back and take a long-term view of the challenge of reducing waste volume by recycling and develop a plan that best serves all the residents of Skagit County.

* Editorials reflect the consensus opinion of the editorial board and are written by its members: Publisher L. Stedem Wood, Editor Don Nelson and City Editor Dick Clever,