When La Crosse County’s Special Waste Manager Jeff Gloyd was told he’d won the Lloyd D. Gladfelter Award and the $3,000 that goes with it, he couldn’t believe it.

Literally.

“I thought someone was putting me on,” he said. “It sounded like a made-up name to me, but I called the number and after we’d talked awhile, I thought ‘I guess it’s real.’”

Part of Gloyd’s confusion stemmed from the fact that the Gladfelter Award is administered as part of a competition by the department of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Political science isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when people think of solid waste.

Still, the award for Gloyd’s medicine disposal program isn’t as far-fetched as it might seem. The Gladfelter Award was designed as a way to reward and recognize government efficiency and effectiveness. Lloyd Gladfelter spent his career as government reporter for the Milwaukee Journal, and he created the award as a way to honor public employees — excluding elected officials — whose actions improve services at the federal, state, county or municipal level.

Nominations are judged on creativity, feasibility and potential impact. There’s little doubt that the impact of Gloyd’s program is already being felt.

During the first seven months of operation, the unwanted medication collection program for La Crosse County safely disposed of more than 8,000 pounds. That’s about 3.1 million pills.

In addition, the program has now been adopted as a model in over 30 counties in Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota.

“The program got big pretty quickly and is now up and running and successful. It makes the collection of drugs easy, long-term and legal,” Gloyd said.

The hazardous effects of dumping prescribed and over-the-counter medications in surface and ground waters has been an increasing concern nationwide in recent years. Gloyd developed an operations plan that collects medications and disposes of them in a licensed hazardous waste incinerator. At present, the nearest such facility to La Crosse is in Sauget, Ill.

Gloyd was hesitant to take full credit for the plan.

“I’m more proud of those in the county who let us take the idea and run with it and of our frontline staff,” he said.

Setting up the operation took a lot of coordination and consultation.

“We talked with the sheriff’s office and with the (U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration), with Franciscan Skemp, with U.S. Fish and Wildlife and with pharmacists and nurses,” Gloyd said.

He is realistic about the program’s potential impact.

“While it is gratifying, as much as I hope we’re making a difference, the impact is impossible to measure,” he said. “It would be hard to say, for example, that there will definitely be an improvement in our ground water. Still, the movement to pick up and properly dispose of hazardous waste is definitely gathering momentum.”

And, a plan devised in the Coulee Region has become a big part of that momentum.