Contractors from as far away as the Oklahoma panhandle gathered at the Allen County Landfill on Thursday to learn about a project years in the making.
“You have the construction and stormwater permits. And in the specs we included basically everything to comprise the plan,” Jared Brooks, an engineer with Schwab Eaton of Manhattan, told the group of 14.
The contractors’ mission is to learn the requirements to build a new cell at the landfill, an area that will be used to collect trash for years to come. Additional contractors did not attend Thursday’s meeting but have expressed interest in the project, a total of more than 30 companies altogether.
They’ll review the county’s needs and submit bids by Jan. 25. County officials will then review the bids and pick a contractor. Work could begin in March and will take about a year.
THE SEEDS for the project were planted decades ago, in the early 1990s, when former commissioners and then-Public Works Director Bill King first developed a plan for a regional landfill to meet the needs of area counties for generations to come. Mitch Garner now heads the landfill and continues that work under the watch of a new trio of commissioners.
The landfill, located east of LaHarpe, first opened in 1974. State and federal regulations changed in the early ’90s, leading commissioners and others to debate whether to invest huge sums of money to develop a regional landfill or close it.
They chose to keep it going, with voters in 1994 approving a half-cent sales tax to fund the project.
“It’s a real asset for the county,” Jerry Daniels, the current commission chairman, said.
“Not only do we collect revenue from other counties that use the landfill, we save millions of dollars by creating that space and using the rock for gravel for our roads. It’s a great deal that we’re trying to keep going for future generations.”
THIS WILL be the second time the county has opened a new cell since the regulations changed in the 1990s.
Along the way, the landfill has evolved to meet stringent and ever-changing state and federal rules in order to protect the environment and the public.
Opening a new cell is a complex and costly endeavor. Extensive dirt work, synthetic liners and holding ponds are required to prevent dangerous chemicals from leaking into the ground and waterways.
In those early years, commissioners Dick Works, Bob Huskey and Gordon Conger debated whether to keep the landfill going. Weighing in its favor, they foresaw Allen County as uniquely positioned for the future.
“We’re lucky. We may not always be so lucky,” then-commission chairman Conger told the Register in 1991. “There are new regulations going to come down from the state and we don’t know what they will be.”
At the time, he predicted the state might require the county to lay down a liner under the refuse. That did come to pass, along with other requirements from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.
“When I first got here in 1992, a lot of little landfills were scattered all through the state. They shut them down,” King recalled Thursday.
