Clay Receives $105K For New Center, Oil Safety

A state grant will help Clay County convert the Pea Ridge green box site to a full convenience center.

Sanitation Director Meghan Deckard said the site has multiple eight-yard dumpsters that will be replaced with a roll-off dumpster. Deckard said they will also use the $98,000 grant to add a compactor to the site that can hold five to six tons of waste.

“Currently our Pea Ridge site is just more for like standard household bagged garbage because that’s all we allot to go in the little eight-yard dumpsters,” Deckard said. “Converting it will allow us to have a whole lot more room to add a roll-off so we can accept more things, bigger things like furniture.”

Deckard said they hope the improved services will decrease the amount of illegal dumping often seen at the facility. The grant came from the Department of Environment and Conservation. Deckard said the conversion is scheduled to finish by the end of June in 2025.

The county also received a $7,000 grant to develop a spill prevention and control plan for the used oil stored at their main sanitation facility.

“Just (to) kind of give us a plan, like a countermeasure plan that in the event of a spill or a situation happening that we have a protocol with state that tells us how we’re going to take care of it, what specifically we’re going to do, what we have onsite to be able to accommodate that,” Deckard said. “And it’ll also tell us anything we need to add to be able to be more in regulation.”

Deckard said the upgraded site will also save them time and money because the roll-off dumpster and compactor will not have to be emptied as often.

“We usually empty our green box site dumpsters at least twice a week,” Deckard said. “Having the roll-off and the compactor at the new site will alleviate that so probably we’ll only have to be swapping the roll-off out once a week and then our compactor probably closer to two weeks.”

Deckard said they will also add a full-size cardboard trailer to the new convenience center.

“They currently just have a little bitty, like it’s made out of corral panels, just like a little square,” Deckard said. “So it tends to get filled pretty quick.”

Deckard said this project has been a goal of the county for multiple years but it was delayed until now because of other sanitation needs.