Development Authority of the North Country

A 50-Year Financial Model for the Landfill That Serves New York's North Country

We rebuilt the Development Authority of the North Country's brittle landfill Excel workbook into a 50-year scenario-planning engine its leadership team uses together.

Aerial view of the Authority's Materials Management Facility landfill in New York's North Country
50yr Projection horizon, purpose-built for landfill planning cycles
2× More assumption variables than the prior workbook
3 Leaders aligned on one shared model - MMF Director, CFO, COO
Shareable Named what-if scenarios - the biggest win over the old model

The Development Authority of the North Country is a regional public-benefit authority serving Jefferson, Lewis, and St. Lawrence counties in upstate New York. Its Materials Management Facility - the Authority’s landfill division - stewards solid-waste operations across the tri-county region, work that makes disciplined, multi-decade financial planning a core part of responsible operations. The problem was that the model behind that planning had become the bottleneck. Quantify rebuilt it into a 50-year scenario-planning engine the Authority’s leaders now use together.

The challenge

The Authority’s landfill financial model lived in a single Excel workbook that had accumulated complexity over years of use. Introducing new assumptions or updated figures was onerous, navigating the model required tribal knowledge, and it couldn’t readily answer the what-if questions leadership needed to ask.

For a landfill with multi-decade planning horizons, that meant strategic conversations were constrained by the tool rather than driven by the data.

What we built

We started by scoping the work with the people who actually use the model. Quantify ran a structured discovery with the Authority’s MMF Director, CFO, and COO, mapping how each stakeholder used - or wanted to use - the model, then defined scope, built a draft, and iterated directly with the CFO to refine functionality before final handoff. (The Authority first heard of Quantify through prior work with neighboring Lewis County, and the same local, hands-on engagement style carried through here.)

Rather than replace the tool the team already trusted, we rebuilt the model as a modern scenario-planning engine - keeping Excel as the familiar interface while layering in the infrastructure to make it genuinely useful across the leadership team:

  • A 50-year projection horizon covering the landfill’s full operational lifecycle.
  • Roughly 2× the modeled variables of the prior workbook, enabling finer-grained assumption control.
  • VBA-powered workflows that streamline navigation and data entry within Excel.
  • SharePoint integration for version control and shared access across leadership.
  • A Power BI layer for saving, sharing, and comparing named what-if scenarios.

The outcome

The Authority now plans against a 50-year horizon purpose-built for landfill lifecycle decisions, with finer control over its assumptions than the old workbook allowed. Just as importantly, the MMF Director, CFO, and COO work from a single shared model - and can create, store, and compare named what-if scenarios, the biggest functional gain over the tool it replaced.

“Quantify did exactly what they said they were going to do, and we received a valuable deliverable that will be extremely useful for our future operations.”

  • Carrie Tuttle, Chief Operating Officer, Development Authority of the North Country

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