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Showers and thunderstorms likely. Potential for severe thunderstorms. Low 61F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 90%..
Showers and thunderstorms likely. Potential for severe thunderstorms. Low 61F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 90%.
The fall county cleanup isn’t being held during its usual month this year, but the more important change to the biannual Keep White County Beautiful Cleanup is that tires will not be accepted, according to White County Judge Michael Lincoln.
“We have what I call a tire crisis going on in the state,” Lincoln said about the decision to not accept tires at the cleanup scheduled for Nov. 3-5 at the White County Fairgrounds.
“We have tire districts that collect tires through what we call the planning districts. Ours is the White River Planning [and Development] District. Our tire collection point is actually in White County on Conway Road, outside of Bald Knob. That has been the collection agency for the 10 counties in the White River Planning District. We’ve had a monofil [landfill] there where we shred the tires and put them in the monofil and then cover them with dirt.”
A monofil landfill serves just one purpose, which in this case was disposing of shredded tires, he said. He told the White County Intergovernmental Council on Thursday that the tires are cut into fourths “mainly so it can’t hold water and bring mosquitos and then we put it in the monofil. After a while we cover it with dirt. That’s been the custom for years since I’ve been elected.”
However, the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality “has now frowned on us in essence. ... Plus, our shredder is broken down and the funding for processing the tires has been cut. so we don’t have any funds to fix our shredder and then we don’t have anywhere to put them when we shred them.”
He said there are 40,000 ties “stacked up” at the Conway Road facility “with no way to process them or nowhere to take them. So as a result of that, they can’t take our tires from the cleanup. So because they can’t take them, we don’t have anywhere to take them, so we are not going to be able to take tires at this year’s cleanup.”
During the April cleanup, the county accepted 4,000 tires, he said, and tires have always been a popular drop-off.
“To be honest, that is why we went to having people provide proof of residency in White County because we really felt we had people outside of White County bringing their tires,” he said.
County residents will continue having to provide a driver’s license, a water bill, a tax assessment or other proof they reside in White County to be able to drop things off at the cleanup.
Cleanups are big in White County. Lincoln said. “We have been taking calls for a month because we usually have the cleanup in October, but the fairgrounds is so busy with rodeo events that I think the first available date that they had was in November, so we took that.”
“We were hoping this tire situation would have been rectified by now,” he said. I’ve been talking to [state] Sen. [Jonathan] Dismang and Rep. [Les] Eaves and Rep. [Cameron] Cooper to try to get the Legislature to free up some additional funds so that we could start the tire processing back, but right now it’s just a big mess.”
Lincoln said he wanted to emphasize that if any White County resident had a question about what is allowed to be dropped off at the cleanup to please call his office in advance instead of being turned away at the gate.
Holly Pulley, an assistant in the White County Road Department, said residents will be entering the fairgrounds off Old Landing Road for the cleanup. On Nov. 3-4, the cleanup will be held from 7:30 a.m.-5 p.m. and on Nov. 5, the cleanup will be open from 8 a.m.-2 p.m.
She said residents can bring appliances, scrap metal, furniture, any bagged trash, roadside litter. “We will take paint as long as it’s dry. We will take lumber, but not like natural brush or vegetation off of someone’s property.”
The cleanups are done in partnership with the city of Searcy.
Lincoln said he believes it was 2015 when a Saline County judge pioneered a new legislative act that would allow for the disposal of tires, and some county judges, him included, knew it was not going to work.
“The reason we knew it wasn’t going to work is because it involved ADEQ and the Department of Finance and Administration.” He said that was meant kind of a “tongue and cheek,” but he didn’t even know who in the DFA would even understand the disposal of tires and neither were any of the legislators aware of what it took to dispose of the tires.
In the bill, Lincoln said, “we knew it wasn’t going to produce enough funding to keep the program solvent, but we could not convince the powers that be that it wasn’t going to work.”
Lincoln said there were two classifications, large tires such as tractor tires and small tires such as regular vehicle tires. “The thing that we were concerned about is that they lowered the funding for the large tires.”
The last-quarter revenue was cut by 32 percent, according to Lincoln. He said if inflation is rising at a record level couple that with a 32 percent cut and “it doesn’t take long to realize you’re going to run out of money, which we did quickly.”
On top of that, Lincoln said, “ADEQ closed our monofill, just shut it down even though they had given us the permit.”
He said the tire problem isn’t just a White County issue but “a statewide problem.” Lincoln said Cotton Plant has millions of tires backlogged.
Lincoln, who is one of 10 county judges in the White River Planning and Development District, said it currently costs the district about $4.33 to process a tire and the reimbursement is $2.38 a tire. “It’s a losing proposition,” he said.
He said the county could put tires in the Judsonia rock quarry “until the roosters or cows come home and nobody would ever know that,” but ADEQ won’t let the county do that. He said his response was “Why?” and he was told it would affect our water table.
Resistance to addressing a problem, such as this one, is something that Lincoln said he doesn’t understand because “even the electric vehicles run on tires.” The real problem. he said, is that there are lies being spread about the planning districts and therefore funding has been shut down for the tire program.
Lincoln said the county cannot go pick tires up because it has no place to take them. Higginson Mayor Randell Homsley said the tires are going to start piling up.
Lincoln asked if any of the mayors at the intergovernmental council meeting wanted to volunteer to work the gate at the Keep White County Beautiful Cleanup this year and tell residents that don’t get the notice about tires, “I’m sorry.” He said he is seriously thinking about having a law enforcement officer there because residents are not going to be happy when they hear tires can’t be accepted this time.
Lincoln encouraged the mayors to call their representatives and senators about the tire problem. He said he wasn’t trying to make the senators and representatives look bad because it is tough to amend legislation when you are not in session and he does not anticipate the governor calling a special session about tires. He said legislators plan to address the issue in the next session, “but that’s February of 2023 and there’s a lot of tire that are going to pile up .”
“I have told our senators and representatives that this affects the agriculture community, it affects the trucking community, it affects school districts with buses, it affects churches with buses and vans, it affects our senior citizen centers with their vans, it affects every citizen in the state of Arkansas,” Lincoln said. “It’s one of the few things that affects every citizen. You cannot ignore this. You cannot. It’s not going to go away. You got to address it and it’s going to cause our citizens to try to do some measures that they should not do, and their liable to get caught and fines as well.
Letona Mayor Sherrel Bennett said his town’s volunteer fire department “got paged last week for a fire and I said, ‘What kind of fire, structure or gas?’ and she said, ‘They didn’t say.’ Well, when we got there there was 100 cars tires on fire and it had got out. He didn’t want to tell them he had car tires burning.”
Lincoln said, “We don’t need tire burnings in White County. That does affect our environment plus it puts our firefighters in harm’s way, too.”
Lincoln said he has challenged Dismang to be the “champion” in the “tire crisis” by challenging students in universities to have an incentive, grant challenge to come up with some viable solutions.He mentioned calling on the University of Arkansas, the University of Central Arkansas and Harding University. He said whoever came up with the best solution would be given the grant.
What: No tires to be accepted at fall cleanup because of backlog at monofil landfill with shredder broken and funding cut
When: Nov. 3-5 (7:30 a.m.5 p.m. Nov. 3-4, 8 a.m.-2 p.m. Nov. 5)
Where: White County Fairgrounds on Davis Drive
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