Commission mulls waste grant
 
Bradshaw will ask for an extension from TDEC to formally accept the grant so that commission can vote at its June 4 meeting.
“Well, you know once you start being in a program you can’t ever stop,” Van Shaver, commissioner, said. “You can’t stop any government program. It’d be the most important program in the whole county when you get ready to pull (the plug). ... This is pretty big stuff. Opening the door to anything new needs extreme vetting. I mean sometimes the simplest sounding things are just going to be wonderful, and we’re going to have unicorns and rainbows popping out of our butts, and it just don’t work out that way.”
 
Chris Parks, county convenience center director, said previously that the $30,000 would allow people to dispose of household hazardous waste more than twice a year. The grant would cover an 8-foot by 40-foot steel temporary household hazardous waste facility for storage until disposal company Clean Harbors collects the items. Funding would cover the facility, site preparation, employee training and labeling inside the building.
 
Parks was not present at the workshop.
 
Loudon’s convenience center is currently the top choice for the facility’s location, Bradshaw said.
 
“I think my concern was that even though you’re going to do the actual screening is, is that person going to be qualified enough to determine if those chemicals (are dangerous together)?” Kelly Littleton-Brewster, commissioner, said. “There are some chemicals that if you mix together are automatically going to be explosive. Well, if you take someone who is not trained.”
Littleton-Brewster’s concern was liability for the county.
 
If the county moves forward with the project, Shaver said it needs to be made “very clear” waste will not be stored at other convenience centers and then transported.
 
Commissioner Bill Satterfield was a proponent of the facility, noting if residents did not have a place to store waste they could opt to illegally dispose of it.
 
“So now instead of having a legal way to trap your thing and dispose of it, now we’re going to ask people to illegally put it in bags and put it in the dumpster and illegally put it in the landfill?” Satterfield said. “... I could have gotten around this by going back at home and opening up my trash bags and putting some of it (in the bags).”
 
Accepting the grant would mean the facility would have to take out-of-county household hazardous waste, Bradshaw said.
 
“I think it’s a mistake. I’m not going to support it,” Shaver said. “I don’t want it to sound like I’m against the department or nothing like that, but we’ve been down this road too many times and we know what happens when you get entangled in the state of Tennessee and grant money. Sooner or later it’s going to stop and then, ‘We’ll just quit.’ You’ll never quit.”

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5/30/18