Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
A new Whitman County Solid Waste Transfer Station is taking shape on the landfill road between Colfax and Pullman.
The $4 million project, being built by Halme Builders of Davenport, will replace the existing transfer station, which was installed in the early 1990s.
At about 60 percent complete, the new gravity-style drop-in system will more than double the capacity for residents and commercial operations to drop off municipal solid waste.
The old facility will be revitalized as a recycling center.
“We’re hoping for 30-50 years on this new building, if not longer,” said David Nails, the county’s Solid Waste and Recycling Director. The new 12,000-square-foot operation will have eight stalls for trucks to back up to, compared to the three in the present one.
The current stalls handle trucks of commercial haulers, such as from Empire Disposal and Pullman Disposal, as well as residential.
The new eight bays, however, will be split into four for residential and four for commercial.
“We’re going to keep them separate now,” Nails said. “It gets pretty hairy there. We definitely had to have eyes in the back of our heads to keep everyone from getting run over.”
A scale on the east side of the new building will serve trucks from Empire Disposal and Pullman Disposal. The concrete and steel transfer-station was designed by CH2Mhill in Boise.
The county-funded project came about after a 2012 contract resulted in new savings in the handling of solid waste.
In July of that year, Whitman County re-bid its existing contract with Waste Management. The resulting new arrangement with Allied Waste reduced the transportation and disposal fee from $15 to $10 per ton.
In the past, materials from the county would be taken from the local transfer station by truck to a landfill in Arlington, Ore. Now, with Allied Waste, the materials are driven to Spokane and put on rail to a landfill in Roosevelt, Wash., across the Columbia River from Arlington.
For the previous contract, Nails said four to six trucks would haul the 240 miles to Arlington and back while now just two make the trip to Spokane.
An estimated $30,000 per month is being saved on the 10-year contract.
Besides the savings in transportation cost, Nails said the new transfer station will allow for an increase in recycling, by its larger capacity and ability to more efficiently segregate materials.
Another savings will come from the new facility’s electric-powered tamping device which costs less to run than the previous station’s diesel mechanism.
Will all of this affect the number of employees at the site?
“I think it will be a more efficient system,” Nails said. “It might be something we look at as employees retire, whether we need to replace them. But there would be no layoffs or anything like that.”
Overall, Nails, who is acting as Project Manager for the new station’s construction, said the project is on-time and on-budget.
“We’re shooting for mid-February to be complete, to open in March or April,” Nails said.
Garth Meyer is a former Whitman County Gazette reporter.
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