The Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality has rewritten its requests for proposals for contractors to close an overfilled landfill in Mountain Home and a tire dump of 1 million tires next-door.
Earlier, the Arkansas Building Authority threw out the bids it received after it published separate requests for proposals for the two projects, citing the high cost of the bids for the tires project and the failure to meet certain requirements for the landfill project, Department of Environmental Quality spokesman Kelly Robinson said.
The Ozark Mountain Regional Solid Waste Management District owns the North Arkansas Board of Regional Sanitation landfill in Baxter County. The district is unable to close the landfill because it defaulted on the landfill’s bonds.
The Department of Environmental Quality is attempting to clean the landfill and tire-dump site, estimating the landfill-closing cost at $16 million and the tires cleanup at $1 million.
In September, the bids submitted to close the landfill came in at $13.9 million, $14.7 million, $14.8 million, $15.3 million and $17.5 million. All but one bid failed to meet Building Authority requirements on properly listing a licensed engineering contractor, according to the authority. Those bids were rejected.
Now, the Environmental Quality Department is accepting bids until Jan. 5, with a mandatory pre-bid visit to the landfill.
The bids on closing the tire dump came in at $1.3 million, $2.2 million and $2.4 million last month, prompting the Building Authority to reject them because they were more than 25 percent higher than what the Environmental Quality Department has to spend, Robinson said.
The department’s contractor is reworking the project so it can be rebid later on, Robinson said.
Melinda Caldwell, executive director of the Ozark Mountain district, said the sites have required cleanup for years, and getting them remediated soon is a priority.
“I know the citizens feel that way, and I feel that way,” Caldwell said, adding that the Environmental Quality Department is doing all of the work on the project.
“It’s unfortunate that both [projects’] bids got thrown out and we had to start over again,” Caldwell said.
The district will reimburse the department for the cleanup costs on both projects, and a default-case receiver recently recommended to a Pulaski County circuit judge that the district assess an $18 annual fee on residents in the district’s six counties to pay back the department and cover any other expenses. Judge Tim Fox is to determine whether such a fee is appropriate.
Caldwell said the district’s board, which consists of mayors and county judges in the district, met earlier this month to discuss the receiver’s report but did not take any action on it.
Bank of the Ozarks petitioned in court for the district, which is a regional operation largely funded by the Department of Environmental Quality, to be taken into receivership because of financial problems in 2014. The bank was trustee for the bonds on which the district defaulted. Geoffrey Treece, an attorney with Quattlebaum, Grooms and Tull, was appointed receiver in May 2015.
Caldwell said district officials are not in regular conversation with the department about the projects and don’t receive reports from the department unless they ask for them.
In the meantime, Caldwell said, she is focusing on the district’s electronics recycling program, setting up recycling in Boone County schools and the city of Marshall, and addressing proper disposal of scrap tires in the district.