News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
Fentress County is preparing to re-open it’s recycling center after a 2019 fire.
Fentress County Mayor Jimmy Johnson said the offices are in the moving process and the building should be completely finished this week. Johnson said the next step is bidding the equipment lost to get the county fully operational
“We lost everything we had, it was a complete, total washout of everything we’ve been in little buildings trying to do our recycle work we’ve not hesitated to do anything,” Johnson said. “We’re still gathering recycling all we can but this will make it so much more permissible to do more things when we get all of our new equipment in.”
However, Johnson said there will be services available while the county waits on other compactors. Once employees start returning to the recycling center for the stock piles of cans, bottles and plastics.
“We’ll start doing our cardboard and all that this time in the building, our office will be in the new building,” Johnson said. “Our glass will be in the new building, so there will be several things that we can do while we’re waiting on our other compactors to come in.”
Johnson said getting everything replaced reached a cost of about $1.1 million dollars. Johnson said the county was able to save about $130,000 dollars by centralizing all the offices to one location.
“We had an ADA handicap that we had to take care of in our office space, we were gonna have to put an elevator in,” Johnson said. “So we’re gonna save about $130,000 by moving our offices out there and have everything in house so we won’t have to put in the elevator in our old building.”
The Fentress County Recycling Center burned in June of 2019.
