The county commission voted last week to contract with Smith County to dispose of DeKalb's household refuse when the new solid waste transfer station is complete. The commission approved a five-year contract with Smith County to take DeKalb's solid waste at the rate of $29 a ton.

Elk Mountain Construction of Cookeville was also awarded the bid to construct the facility on Highway 70 east behind Tenneco Automotive. Elk Mountain submitted a bid of $1,308,092 with a deductive alternate of $425,077 from the base bid for road work at the station.

The Smithville Industrial Board recently deeded the property where the transfer station will be built to the City of Smithville, who then turned it over to the county. The project will consist of a 5,400 square foot metal building for the waste transfer station, a scale house building, and an office building. An access road must also be built. According to the contract, Elk Mountain has 150 days to construct the facility.

Foster said the existing landfill will soon be full. “According to the engineering estimates, we probably have nine months left on it, but we'll still put stuff in there until we fill it,” the mayor said. “Then we'll do a Class III/IV cell for construction material.”

The mayor said the transfer station should be financially preferable to building and maintaining a new Class I landfill,” he said. "We're taking about 14,000 tons of garbage a year into the landfill. While we're closing that landfill, we can create a class III/IV landfill to take in construction material, household furniture, and other non-household garbage and cut that by at least by 30 percent, or maybe down to 10,000 tons a year."

Foster said the pros outweigh the cons, and that getting out of the landfill business is a good move for the county. "The good part about this agreement with Smith County is that it's for five years, and they will take our garbage for $29 a ton. It currently costs us at least $35 a ton to dispose of it in our own facility. The landfill we're in now costs about $4,000,000 to build. It has lasted twelve years. Now we've got to do post-closure on it, which means you have to encapsulate it in a 60 mil plastic membrane, and then cover it with three or four feet of dirt. You're then talking about probably another million and a half dollars to close that landfill. This way you don't have to haul leachate, and you don't have to do post-closure on it and guarantee that post-closure by monitoring it for 30 years after closure. The environmental liability is extremely dangerous for the county. That is the reason primarily that everybody thinks this is the thing to do," the mayor said.

The trash must still be transported to Smith County, however.

“We still have to contract with somebody, which will have to be bid, to haul that garbage to them or haul it ourselves,” Foster said. “I don't think we want to get too much into that. Some of the garbage, like the 40-yard compaction units maybe at Alexandria and some of those, where you could transport maybe fifteen tons at a time or twenty tons, we could probably load on our truck and haul to Smith County quicker than we could actually haul it here. We would actually save money doing that.”