Folsom, Calif.-based Waste Connections has acquired Hudson Valley Waste Holding Inc. and its wholly-owned subsidiary, County Waste and Recycling Service Inc. According to a report in The Business Review in Latham, N.Y., the purchase price was $299 million.

In its press release announcing the purchase, Waste Connections says that County Waste “is the largest privately owned solid waste services company in New York’s Hudson Valley” and notes that County Waste has a total annual revenue of approximately $120 million. The acquisition includes six collection operations, three transfer stations and a single-stream materials recovery facility with a processing capacity of 600 tons per day.

According to the Business Review report, Scott Earl was the majority owner of Hudson Valley. Clairvest Group Inc., a Toronto-based private equity firm, also was a shareholder.

“County Waste has copied our playbook in building a leading position within its markets, focused on controlling the waste stream and almost doubling in size over the past five years,” said Ron Mittelstaedt, chairman and CEO of Waste Connections, in a statement. “The company also has invested almost $50 million over the past 24 months in new fleets , containers and facilities to position itself for continuing growth … Its market presence and asset quality are unique for a privately held company operating in secondary, competitive markets.”

Waste Connections’ purchase of Hudson Valley fits in with its operational philosophy. As Mittelstaedt told Waste Age in the magazine’s January 2011 profile of Waste Connections, “The largest publicly held waste companies focus by and large on metropolitan statistical areas with populations greater than 500,000, while avoiding rural and further-out suburban communities … Our model has very little of that. Mostly we’re in suburban and rural America, in metro areas with 150,000 people or fewer. We compete with small, private companies. If a market we want to target is competitive, we’ll generally enter it by buying the largest private company.”

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(From WasteConnections.com)