Chicago Landfill Recognized as Business of the Year

By Camille DeVaul · Wed Dec 10 2025

The Paso Robles and Templeton Chamber of Commerce will honor outstanding community members at the annual Templeton Christmas Tree Auction and Awards Ceremony, held this year at SpringHill Suites. Among the 2025 award recipients is Waste Connections’ Chicago Landfill, named one of the Businesses of the Year for its extraordinary service following the devastating Templeton Feed & Grain fire.

For Chicago Landfill site manager Dannette Fieguth, the recognition came as both an honor and a humbling surprise.

"It's an honor to be recognized," Fieguth said. "But I also feel a little humble because there were a lot of other people that came together, a lot of other companies that gave of their own time and expense. So I'm just really honored."

The Templeton Feed & Grain fire earlier this year left behind not only a community landmark in ruins, but also a heavy financial burden for the Jermin family. Fieguth first learned through social media that the building had not been insured and immediately recognized the magnitude of what cleanup would entail.

"I saw on social media that Rick [Jermin] didn't have insurance ... it [the building] was uninsurable," she shared. "I thought about not only the loss to the community, but the loss to their family in terms of what a cost for a cleanup would look like and not having insurance. I just felt like we needed to help."

Fieguth reached out to her district manager, Jeff Clarin, to ask whether Waste Connections might step in. The answer came without hesitation.

"I'm part of the San Luis Obispo district for Waste Connections, and I just asked Jeff if we could help and Jeff [said] absolutely. So that's basically how it all began,” Fieguth said.

What followed was months of hands-on support from Chicago Landfill to help take in and properly manage the massive debris field left behind by the fire. Fieguth also praised the work of Andy Brown and the ABI Engineering crew, who handled the on-the-ground demolition and materials sorting.

“Andy at ABI and his crew, Jason Montgomery, did an absolutely fantastic job of sorting through the material," she said. "They easily could have demoed everything in a haphazard way. And that would have actually been bad for us because we would have had to landfill a lot more waste than we did.”

Instead, crews separated concrete, metal, steel, grain, and wood, ensuring only appropriate materials went to the landfill. Much of the remaining wood and grain was repurposed.

“We're actually mixing that with some wood chips of our own and using it for erosion control on external landfill slopes," Fieguth explained. "A lot of that waste was not landfilled. It was put to what we call in the industry, beneficial reuse.”

Chicago Landfill has operated since the 1970s, originally run by the Johnson family before ownership transferred to Mike Hoover in the late 1980s. Since then, it has changed hands a few more times. Most recently to Waste Connections in 2021. Despite being part of a nationwide company, the site maintains its local character.

“Waste Connections is a fantastic company," Fieguth said. "Each site has autonomy to do what they need to do within the terms of their own framework and the way the community operates. That's something that's very unique about Waste Connections ... if we were another waste company, I doubt that would have happened ... we still retained a lot of that small town atmosphere.”

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