The DeKalb County Commission is taking another look at the hours of operations for the Solid Waste Department and local convenience sites.
County Mayor Matt Adcock announced last fall that the convenience sites would closed on Sundays, but would be open Mondays through Saturdays from 9 a.m. until 6 p.m. Adcock said he decided to change the hours to give the 24 part-time employees Sundays off and to bring more uniformity to the operating hours during the week. Each of the employees are scheduled to work 27 hours per week.
Local residents seemed to be divided on the move, but as the summer months fast approach, some say that the hours may be a problem as tourist come to visit Center Hill Lake.
During the regular monthly meeting of the County Commission, on Monday, March 27, local resident and businessman Robin Driver addressed the commission asking that the action be reconsidered. Driver, an operator of vacation rentals, said keeping the convenience sites being closed on Sundays makes it hard for vacation homeowners and tourist at the lake.
“I come here tonight to speak to you on behalf of the people who are vacation homeowners on Center Hill Lake, the people who come and visit our lake, and the people who call Smithville, DeKalb County, and Center Hill Lake home for a short period. They are not as fortunate as us. They don’t get to stay here full time,” said Driver.
“This past weekend was one of our nicest weekends we have had so far this year and a lot of these people were up here visiting and using their vacation homes for the first time,” Driver continued.” Since you have passed the ordinance to close the dump sites down (Sundays), myself or my staff received over 32 calls this weekend from people wanting to know where do we take our trash?”
“These dump sites have been open on Sundays for many, many years and I have no idea what the reason was for closing them,” Driver continued. “I am very concerned that this is going to cause a huge problem. The vast majority of these people come here and stay the weekend and then they leave to go home. When they leave on Sundays, they need some place to take their trash. If you or I have to wait until Monday, it’s not a big deal. We can let it set there for an extra day. These folks are not going to let it (garbage) set in these vacation homes for a week until they are back the next week.”
“I am here to ask you to reconsider your position on the trash situation. Otherwise, I think people are going to be dumping their trash at these sites that are unattended,” said Driver.
Driver cited statistics revealing the economic impact of tourism in DeKalb County. “Our visitors last year spent $51.2 million in business sales in DeKalb County. A 30% increase over the previous year. That was 2.3 million people who visited our county last year. Thirty-two million dollars in direct spending in DeKalb County, $51.2 million in business sales and $1.1 million in local sales tax paid by overnight tourists in DeKalb County. On average every single day in DeKalb County, these people are spending $87,672, $3,015 in local daily taxes and because of that each one of us gets a $322 tax relief on our property taxes because of the money coming in from these people,” said Driver.
The following day, County Mayor Matt Adcock released a statement as to why the change was made. The statement reads as follows:
“Our new operating hours for the convenience sites are 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday. These hours are to provide better availability for the largest amount of the community. Although we know that this will not be a perfect fit for some of our citizens, we do believe it fits for the most amount of people. We have heard a lot of satisfied citizens on how this schedule has helped them. The schedule is based off of the most used work schedules. People working a first shift job normally get off work in the hours of 4pm or 5pm. This is why the sites stay open till six. To give people an hour or two to get home and dispose of their waste. Second shift job employees can utilize the time from 10 a.m. till noon before they go into work. And then third shift job employees have time to go home and collect their trash to dispose of at 9 a.m.”
“Again, we do know it can't be perfect for everyone, but we have tried to make it as convenient as possible for the most amount of people.”
“The transfer station that is operated by the Capital Waste Company also accepts trash at all times of operations. This transfer station is where all DeKalb County trash is taken. The trash is then shipped to the landfill located in Dayton, Tn. DeKalb County does not have an operational landfill anymore. Although the transfer station weighs trash for large industrial trash and charges companies for dumping there, citizens' that are there with a reasonable amount of household trash can dump there for free. It is only charged if it is a large amount that is more than the average household would accumulate in a week.”
“The transfer station is open from 6 a,m. to 2:30 p.m., Monday through Friday. The Capital Waste Company does close their operation on Saturday and Sunday. It is open to the public, industrial companies, and commercial companies. The transfer station is located on Transfer Station Road, which is centrally located in the county. It is behind Tenneco off of Sparta Hwy just after the animal shelter. So, technically there is a way to dispose of household trash from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. in DeKalb County Monday through Friday. Saturday’s convenience sites are open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. for the people that could not make it through the week. This weekend day alone causes a backup in the flow of the system.”
“In further discussion, we see that Capital Waste is the company that transports the trash out of DeKalb County. Without their operation, trash accumulates at the transfer station and the convenience sites waiting to be removed from our county. Again, Capital Waste is closed on Saturday and Sunday. This creates an issue for DeKalb County. We try to dump all we can on Friday to prepare for Saturday so that it can hold us over till Monday when Capital Waste reopens on Monday to transfer the trash away. Before, when we were open on Sunday, our convenience site dumpsters were completely full and citizens were being turned away because of the trash that had accumulated. The other surrounding counties around us are all closed on Sundays, so their citizens would come and throw away their trash here as well. The trash would be falling on the ground of the convenience sites and falling out of moving trucks littering our county because of the overloaded trucks. Full dumpsters sat at the transfer station waiting to be taken from Saturday. And every dumpster in the county is full waiting to be emptied. Then on Monday the entire system would be extremely behind trying to catch up from the overloaded system. Many made the comment to just not let people without DeKalb vehicle tags enter the convenience site to mitigate the out of county people, but some people from other counties have tags from their primary residence but have a secondary home here and still pay DeKalb property taxes. Many employees made the statement that they would like Sundays off with their families. So, because of the logistical nightmare of keeping the operation open with the combination of giving our employees at least one confirmed day off without even having to worry about someone calling out so they have to go in, we made a decision to close all operations down on Sundays.”
“This decision worked just as planned. The employees are happier, and the operation of transferring trash has ran so much more smoothly. We no longer have out of county citizens filling up our dumpster cans. This saves us so much money alone! The county pays an average of $55 a ton to dispose of the waste. In the month of November, the county paid $99,148 in just that month alone on disposing county waste. In December, DeKalb County paid $101,521.18 to dispose of county trash. The county has only budgeted $985,000 to dispose of this waste. If you divide this 985,000 by 12, the number of months in a year. That only allows us to spend 82,083 a month in trash disposal. This is why we charge a fee to companies and to residents that dump anything larger than what a resident would normally accumulate in a week of household garbage. We have only budgeted for what a normal household would accumulate in a week. People abusing the system and out of county residents cause a problem to our overall budget. We are already in danger of going over our budget. Although we have taken precautionary steps to reduce trash collections and also try to offset it as much as possible with revenues, the rapidly increasing population is making it very difficult.”
“When the DeKalb County Budget Committee meets soon in March, they will be given this information and more to see the great strain that has been placed on this topic. The fact that we must budget more for waste disposal is evident, but how is the next question. More people means more trash. The commission will have a big job to do moving forward to this new budget process, but I, Mayor Matt Adcock, will help in any way I can. James Goff, the Solid Waste Director, has been asked by myself to pull as many statistics as possible to help the upcoming budget committee make the best educated decisions they can. By keeping the commission informed on budget restraints, tonnage of trash accumulated, price per ton, and much more crucial information, that they can use to make better decisions that will positively impact DeKalb County.”
“Also, I would like to enlighten all of our community members about our new furniture dumpsters located at the Shiny Rock convenience site located on the new highway 56 south and the snow's hill convenience site located on Nashville Highway. These were chosen because they had the amount of room to accommodate for it and they are centrally located.”
“Before we had asked everyone to take furniture to the transfer station where the workers can unload them onto a flat level concrete pad instead of trying to lift heavy furniture over someone's head possibly injuring an employee or community member at one of the regular dumpsters at a convenience site. Now we have a furniture dumpster that has the door opened to throw small items of furniture inside without having to raise the furniture over anyone's head. For very large items that you don't believe would be easily placed into a dumpster or a large amount of furniture we would still ask for you to go to the transfer station to dispose of this.”
“If you have further questions, call the Solid Waste Department at 615-597-6071. Thank you to the community for all of your support and we will continue to strive to perform above the expectations of the public.”
The commission is planning on scheduling a meeting of the public works committee to help resolve the problem.
