Ribbon cut on Big Spring’s sexy new landfill
Are landfills sexy? The question was a bone of humorous contention at the dedication and ribbon cutting for Big Spring's new Big Sandy Landfill, located at 3601 Old Colorado City Highway north of town, Friday morning.
Mayor Shannon Thomason kicked the debate off during his opening remarks when he said, “So what can you say about a landfill? I've been wondering all week what we could say about this. There's nothing fancy, nothing neat about them. But they serve a huge task and provide a huge service in our community. It's one of the big ones along with water, sanitation, streets — landfill. And probably landfill is the most work
and has the least recognition of all.”
Thomason went on to praise the sanitation workers that
remove tons of refuse and garbage from our homes to keep our communities livable.
“We've got a crew of very
hardworking sanitation folks that work for the city of Big
Spring,” he said. “They're out in the streets every day taking tons of refuse away from our houses and getting it away from the core of the community to prevent any health-related items that may come along that, obviously, having trash around all the time would result in.”
After noting that the new landfill is designed to handled Big Spring's refuse for the next century, Thomason uttered the fateful line: “There's not a whole lot I can say that's really inspiring. There's nothing really sexy about landfills, but they serve a really important purpose to our community and we're glad to have this one completed.”
After thanking local city and county leaders, as well as Parkhill, Smith and Cooper engineering firm, for working hard to bring the new landfill to fruition, City Manager Todd Darden took up the gauntlet on behalf of landfills' sexiness.
“What it means to our citizens is many millions of dollars in savings to be operating our own landfill still today,” Darden said. “What it costs to ship your trash somewhere else – and the closest place that we looked at was Snyder, and the hauling fees alone to get our trash over to Snyder was in the millions of dollars – so that's the
sexy part of it, Mayor. We saved our residents and our county residents millions of dollars by having this facility.”
Darden bragged on the city's sanitation employees.
“If there's one thing we do good in the city, we operate a good landfill,” he said. “We have great staff, and Sanitation has a shorter haul to make to have this landfill here in Howard County.”
Holly Holder, Sector Director of the Parkhill, Smith and Cooper Environmental Group, agreed with Darden on the landfill's obvious sexy qualities.
“We consider landfill work sexy in our side of the office” Holder said. “We're going to try to convince him that landfill work is sexy.”
Don't confuse a new, modern landfill with a simple dump, Holder warned.
“If you really want to get my ire, call this a dump,” he said. “This is not a dump. This is a solid-waste management facility, because we quit having dumps in the early '90s. The old days of just digging a hole, throwing trash in and walking away are long gone. This is an environmentally sound facility. The system is lined with a dual lining system to prevent contamination of the ground water. We have a series of
ground water wells that are all around the facility that we continually on a regular basis pull water out, sample it, analyze it, and report to the state.”
Answering questions following the opening ceremony at the facility, Thomason said the new facility is just in time to take over from the city's previous landfill, which is located on FM 700 on the east side of Big Spring.
“It's been a long time coming, and it's certainly something we've needed,” he said. “We've been trying to squeak by these last few months with the amount of space we've got available at the old landfill. We all knew this, but it was a matter of timing it so the closure of the old one and the opening of the new one more or less worked out.”
Darden said monitoring of the old landfill, which opened in the 1970s, will continue for the next 30 years due to Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) requirements.
“You have to have a 30-year post-closure plan for the old landfill,” he said. “So we'll have money set aside for the next 30 years to ensure that all the environmental
concerns that TCEQ has for that site are met. So for 30 years, we'll have to monitor and maintain some of our environmental services that we have there.”
Darden said the old landfill could eventually be made into a park or equestrian trails.
“We'll get final cap, six feet thick, of good, clean dirt and grass planted on top of that,” he said. “The only thing it could be used for is a park or equestrian trail or something like that. Our future plans are possibly in line with possibly a new park, a walking trail, a horse trail or something like that. Something that the general public could still use that wouldn't hinder the post-clusure monitoring.”
After the opening remarks, community leaders stood with Mayor Thomason as he snipped a red ribbon with a pair of oversize scissors, signifying that the landfill is open for business.
After the ceremony, Al's and Sons Barbecue catered lunch for those present at the ribbon cutting.