Recycling center to open in fall
Calls for bids to remodel part of the old Zartic plant are expected to go out next month.
A call for bids to remodel part of the old Zartic plant as the new Rome-Floyd County Recycling Center is expected to go out in May.
Contractors will have 45 to 60 days to prepare their offers and construction is expected to take three to four months, County Manager Jamie McCord said.
“We’ll use some pre-constructed pieces, but October is probably the earliest we could move in,” he told county commissioners during a briefing last week.
The 2013 special purpose, local option sales tax package earmarks
$1,379,000 to improve the recycling program. Officials decided to move the operation from cramped space on Watters Street to a 25,000-square-foot leased warehouse at 412 Lavender Drive.
McCord said there’s enough space to hold all the household hazardous waste and electronics collections at the site, and there’s plenty of room to store materials.
Plans include installing new truck scales and using four of the five existing loading docks, as a start. A roll-up wall will make it easier to get the collections into the sorting area.
“Everything can be dumped and then pushed right inside,” McCord said.
The building will be reconfigured to include restrooms, a break room, a storage room and a multi-purpose room that could be used as an education center in the future.
Public Works Director Michael Skeen tentatively budgeted $1,270,000 for the work, which includes a new sprinkler system and new equipment. However, McCord said they’ll use in-house labor to cut
costs even tighter, to save funds to beautify the Watters Street site.
County commissioners did approve a $40,000 contract with architect Robert Nobel to draw up plans for the plant renovations.
“There are some things we can’t do internally, and we need to prepare accurate bid documents,” McCord said.
He said two vendors he spoke to about sorting and compacting equipment confirmed that moving the program to the Lavender Drive site is a good long-term decision.
“They said we could do two times the processing and still have room to grow. We’ve never had room to grow before,” McCord said.