The new garbage collection convenience site on Highway 56 south may open in a few days.
County Mayor Mike Foster addressed this issue during Monday night’s county commission meeting. “The site is ready to inspect. It should be inspected Tuesday and if everything goes well we will have it open by Monday or maybe if we get everything going, we might get it open Sunday. But it will be open either Sunday or Monday. All we’re waiting on is the electrical inspection. One of the compactors won’t be there but the other one will and we’ll have open cans. It will take us a while to get everything else back in place and they will still have to issue the permit but they have given us the okay to go ahead.”
The new convenience site is near the Smithville Nursery location.
Foster also talked about an auction set for Saturday at 10:00 a.m. on North Congress Boulevard in which surplus county property will be sold including the old ambulance service building on the Cookeville Highway. The county is connecting city sewer service to the building to help attract potential buyers to the sale.”We will be selling some of the Sheriff’s confiscated and used property and equipment from other departments. We bought the grinder pump today (Monday) to hook it up to the city (sewer) and they’re supposed to hook it up Wednesday. So if everything goes well, it will be in place on Wednesday. The grinder pump was $2,100. The tap fee is $550 and then there’s the installation costs so it’s going to be about what we thought, somewhere close to $4,000 probably, but that will have the septic problem solved which is one of the main drawn backs about it selling. Even if they do not have it operating by Saturday, we will announce out there Saturday that the county will finish installation and will have paid for everything by then.”
The issue of alerting people in the event of tornado warnings for DeKalb County was also discussed. Foster says the best alternative is possibly urging people to obtain Noaa Weather Radios.. “With the storms that hit Trousdale, Sumner, and Macon Counties, we’ve had a lot of questions about alarm systems. I’ve had Brad (Mullinax) get some stuff together for us. We thought we could do this through the reverse 911 system but I think we’ve pretty well decided that if we do this, it will have to be modified because it will only notify 48 people per minute and we thought it would be 200. When you start trying to contact 8,000 homes, it would tie the phone lines up. We probably would want a system where we could notify maybe a thousand homes, then maybe have them call some neighbors. From everything they have told me, the alarm system is probably cost prohibitive. Each one of the alarms is about $20,000 and they say we’d probably need one every mile and there are 307 square miles in DeKalb County. The absolute affect of it is there’s a lot of people who wouldn’t hear the sirens anyway. They would be too far away. The thing that everybody seems to suggest is the Noaa weather radio. They are about $20 each and you plug it in and it works on batteries as well. If there is an alarm, it will turn the radio on and notify the homeowner. That probably is the best solution for everybody along with these dial up numbers too. I think anything we can do to help in the way of notification is the thing we really need to look at because if you go down to Macon County and look at the devastation it’s pretty unbelievable.”
Director of Schools Mark Willoughby says the school system’s Connect-Ed could also be used to help alert many people in the county.
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