Questions continue to be raised regarding spending for equipment repairs at the Mississippi County landfill, as Quorum Court justices noticed invoices for an additional $42,900 repair job on a Terex compactor which has been worked on before.
Sanitation committee chairman Justice Michael White said he pulled the invoices for the work after he noticed a check to Hollister Industrial Drives for $38,960. Hollister is the company which does most of the landfill's repair work, and is located in Branson, Missouri.
"It's not the responsibility of the quorum court or our authority to look at and question each individual invoice," he said. "But it is our job to appropriate money for the county to our elected officials so they can maintain their own budget. I don't normally go and pull individual invoices but our repair bills are running so rampant in the landfill that I've been watching a little more closely, and these two just came up."
Excel Heavy Equipment Repair of Fredericktown, Missouri, which also does repair work for the landfill, issued an invoice for $3,950 for assessing damage to the compactor and removing the transmission for inspection. The invoice from Hollister lists a charge of $38,960 for cleaning and dismantling the transmission, and replacing clutches, o-rings and pan gaskets.
"The only thing I see they did is replace some clutches and o-rings and there are no parts listed or details of what happened to all that money," said White. "I don't see any major parts on there. I asked a farmer what he would spend on a big transmission and he said $10,000-15,000, and he thought that was a lot. Here we're spending $40,000 on this particular old machine and it's not the first time we've worked on it."
Landfill director Nathan Taylor said he did not sign the invoice, which was signed by County Judge Randy Carney, according to Taylor.
"When this bill came out, the judge was supposed to get in contact with you. I did not sign this bill," said Taylor. "Our operator brought the machine into the shop too quickly and slammed it from forward into reverse and that's what got the transmission. It sounds like a lot of money to me for that work. The judge had me send it back over there [to Hollister] because that's where it was worked on before, but he was supposed to get with you on that bill."
Taylor told the committee he has recently started asking for bids on large equipment repairs, but no bids were taken on this particular job.
"Would you be surprised if I told you that a Terex mechanic said it would cost less than $10,000 to rebuild a transmission like this?" White asked. "I'm not of authority. It's the judge's job and yours to take care of this, but we're trying to do right here, and the reason our spending is out of control is that we're not checking, and it seems that there are several jobs like this. The truck that we were questioning just a few weeks ago now has another $1,000 bill on it, since our last meeting. I'm not questioning whether the work needed to be done, I'm questioning what we were charged for it, we've been asking for months for you guys to take bids on these jobs and we aren't seeing any changes being made yet."
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Also Wednesday, the committee heard a presentation from Paul Crawford of FTN Associates, the county's environmental consulting firm. Crawford said he had assurances from the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality that a draft permit for construction of the county's new landfill cell would be issued within the next two to three weeks. The permitting process for this particular cell has been going on since 2007, and Crawford said the reason it has taken such an abnormally long time is that the cell will feature something that's the first of its kind in the state -- a land irrigation feature connected to the leachate collection system, designed to be environmentally friendly and save the county money.
If the permit is issued as predicted, Crawford suggested the county begin construction on the cell by this summer in order to allow closure of the current cell, which is nearing its legal limit. Cell construction is estimated to cost between $800,000 and $900,000, which Crawford said is cheaper than it has been in years because of the reduced price of oil.
sspears@blythevillecourier.com