A contract was awarded to construct two new cells at the municipal landfill, and the City Council listened to a report about bulk waste collection.
Two more cells will be excavated at Lawton’s sanitary landfill under a $3.84 million contract the council awarded to 4x Construction Group of Mansfield, Texas, the lowest of four bidders for the job. City Engineer Joseph Painter said construction should be completed within 260 calendar days.
The City of Lawton owns 760 acres for solid waste disposal, Caitlin Gatlin, the city’s communications manager, told Southwest Ledger last November. The landfill currently occupies 243 of those acres and the remainder are for expansion, she said.
The new cells 6 and 7 will be individual waste-holding units inside the overall landfill, and each cell will encompass approximately 9.6 acres, Gatlin said.
Each cell will have a 2-foot compacted clay liner and will be covered with a 60-millimeter HDPE geomembrane and 250-millimeter geocomposite liner, then covered with a minimum of 1 to 2 feet of protective cover, usually sand.
“With the addition of two cells, we will be required to perform additional semiannual groundwater monitoring of wells located on the east and west sides of the new cells,” Gatlin said. The ODEQ requires this to be performed twice a year “to ensure there is no leaching into the groundwater systems that flow below the surface of the landfill,” she said.
In a related matter, Cynthia Williams, deputy director of the Public Works Department, told the council that 1,788,000 pounds of bulk waste were collected in the past year.
The Solid Waste Division hauls off compliant bulk waste from approximately 800 to 900 Lawton residences each week, Williams said.
“We want to be on schedule every single week of the year,” she said. There were several occasions last year when bulk collection exceeded 72 hours, she said; those included storm debris cleanup operations, holiday schedules, equipment breakdowns, and employee shortages for various reasons.
The Solid Waste Division has five grapple trucks dedicated to bulk waste removal, and three new non-CDL (commercial driver’s license) trucks “are expected to be delivered soon,” Gatlin said.
“Providing a designated avenue for the proper disposal of bulky items reduces instances of illegal dumping,” Mayor Stan Booker said.
Councilman Kelly Harris said the city needs someone designated to “go through neighborhoods in this town and write citations” to individuals who pile bulk waste at the curb ‘out of cycle’ (when it’s not their designated week). “Maybe if we wrote more tickets, people would be more compliant with the rules,” he said.