HR committee creates county engineer position
The growth of residential development in the unincorporated area of Garland County has underscored the need for codes regulating drainage and setbacks.
Having a civil engineer on staff would help the county establish and enforce the regulations, County Judge Darryl Mahoney said.
“If we hire an engineer it can also direct us into perhaps getting some regulations in the future about drainage, setbacks, things like that,” he told the Garland County Quorum Court Human Resources Committee last month. “We have a ton of new subdivisions and developments coming across my desk. I’m trying to work through them and look at the drainage.
“Right now stormwater regulates the quality of water that leaves property. We need to be able to regulate the quantity, because we have several places in the county where somebody builds a house and a man owns a lot right next to them. They just put a pipe over there and dump all their water right off in that. We need to have some type of drainage regulation.”
The committee created a civil engineering position to help the county with drainage, stormwater and road issues, setting a salary range of $71,967 to $107,951 based on the job rating system the county uses to determine compensation ranges.
Mahoney requested a $73,477 salary for the position and consulted with B & F Engineering, the local firm that provides most of the county’s engineering services, on the job description presented to the committee.
“I don’t know if we can hire somebody with this, but this is where we have to start,” he told the committee. “We’ll be looking for somebody just out of school or someone who’s close to retirement and wants to slow down a little bit. It will be paid out of the road fund. This is a position we’ve needed for a long time. We just haven’t been able to fund it.”
Mahoney said the density of development in the unincorporated area has also become a problem, one that’s expected to become more profound with the city of Hot Springs lifting restrictions on water and wastewater
connections and extensions in the unincorporated area earlier this year.
Up to a 1-mile area beyond the city limits is subject to the city’s subdivision code, which regulates drainage, landscaping and distances between building lines and property lines. The city’s subdivision code doesn’t extend beyond its extraterritorial jurisdiction.
“At some point, we’re going to have to look at some type of setback from property lines, because around the lake, especially, they’re squeezing in houses pretty tight and that could be a public safety issue,” Mahoney told the committee.
Mahoney said a civil engineer would help the county respond to issues with its rights of way in a more timely manner.
“(The engineer) could identify issues with roads and tell us how to fix them correctly,” he told the committee. “We hire (the Arkansas Department of Transportation) to do all of our bridge inspections, and we will continue to. Whoever we hire will be able to take the report and specify what we need to do to make that bridge right. If it’s an insufficient structure we need to be able to take care of it.”
The Human Resources Committee has no appropriating authority. Funding requests for new positions are presented to the Finance Committee, which decides if the requests advance for consideration by the full quorum court.
Landfill positions
The Cedar Glades Landfill is “setting records” for Class 1 and 4 waste it receives from the public, Mahoney told the committee, prompting the need for more workers to separate the two classes and further the county’s recycling efforts.
Workers in the landfill’s transfer station don’t separate recyclables co-mingled with household garbage, or Class 1 waste, the county’s contract hauler collects from more than 20,000 residential and commercial accounts in the unincorporated area. The landfill is a pass-through for that waste, taking what the hauler collects to the Saline County Regional
Solid Waste Landfill in Bauxite.
Workers do separate recyclables the public brings to the landfill. Their work was recently recognized by the Arkansas Recycling Coalition, which conferred its Government Recycler of the Year award on the county. The two new laborer positions Mahoney requested will help further that effort.
“Recycling has increased by 30% in five years,” Environmental Services Director Billy Sawyer said in a letter to the Human Resources Committee. “We are being overrun with cardboard and plastics 1 and 2. We are planning in the near future to start recycling more 3, 4 and 5s. This will save our landfill air space and help the bottom line.
“We feel the funding for the two new laborer positions is justified based on the trends we have seen over the last five years.”
If the quorum court decides to fund the new positions, they’ll join the more than 40 positions budgeted in the sales tax-supported solid waste fund.