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The Frederick Board of County Commissioners made a mistake July 1 when it voted to spend $50,000 on a consultant to perform a financial analysis of the planned incinerator.

The decision comes after opponents have hounded county officials for answers to financial questions related to the incinerator, which commissioners approved last summer for the McKinney Industrial Center off Md. Route 85, south of the City of Frederick, near the county's wastewater treatment plant.

The project is a partnership between Frederick and Carroll counties, and would cost an estimated $527 million. Frederick's share is $316 million (about 60 percent) and Carroll would pick up the remainder. The incinerator would be big enough to burn 1,500 tons of trash per day, and is expected to open in 2015.

But opponents have not been satisfied with answers officials have provided to questions about the finances. For example, they want to know how much the county has spent so far on designing the project, which is one year into a three-year design phase.

Such a request is reasonable, and should be easy to compile for county staffers. But the only figures released were in March, when the county said it had spent $739,549 on site plan work, design and permitting between Jan. 22 and March 12.

No other dollar amounts have been released, so Caroline Eader, a leading opponent and newly filed candidate for the Board of County Commissioners, filed a formal request for the information, including all billing statements, invoices, spreadsheets and expense documents.

The amount spent to date is important, not only for watchdogs concerned about tracking county dollars, but because of the fall election. If a new majority on the Board of County Commissioners opposes the incinerator, it can quickly vote to kill it, meaning that whatever money spent up to the vote will be for naught.

If voters want that, so be it, but they should also know exactly how much money is at stake — county officials have previously said the most they are on the hook for during the design phase is $3 million — and how much they will spend on alternatives, the most obvious of which includes continued trucking the county's trash to out-of-state landfills.

The county should not have to spend $50,000 on a consultant to answer such questions, answers that incinerator opponents will probably take issue with anyway.

Commissioners would have been wiser had they decided to spend a portion of that money to improve the website dedicated to the incinerator with user-friendly graphics and information. The way the page is designed and information presented, residents have to already know where to find what they are looking for, which defeats the purpose.