White County expanding operating hours at three convenience centers to provide residents with trash disposal options six days a week.
County Executive Kyle Goff said the expansion targets the Doyle, Rockhouse, and Bakers Crossroads locations to ensure a site is available in every quadrant of the county. Goff said the Cassville center already operates on a six-day schedule, and the new plan brings the other three sites in line with that frequency.
“I think just by the nature of the name convenience, we want to try to make these a little more convenient and open these up and try to reduce some of the bottlenecks on the Monday, Wednesday, Friday that the centers are already open,” Goff said.
Goff said the county allocated approximately $50,000 to fund the additional hours. This budget covers the necessary payroll for staff and the increased transport costs associated with hauling the extra volume of waste collected during the week.
“We’ve had a lot of residential development in White County, a lot of new homes are going up and it seems like more people are ordering their groceries online, a lot of ordering from Amazon and Walmart and Sam’s Club, and that leads to an abundance of trash, more cardboard,” Goff said. “So we’re trying to hit some of those needs as we continue to grow, this is just kind of a natural step if we’re going to continue to bring in new homes and new people and new residential development, our population grows, there is going to be more solid waste that happens.”
Goff said the selected locations are full-service centers equipped with compactors to handle household trash. These sites are also capable of accepting larger materials such as wood, cardboard, and tires that other centers without compactors cannot process.
“Just for proximity, just so everybody has a location within if you look at it on a map everybody will have a location hopefully within 10 to 15 minutes of them,” Goff said. “And then maybe there’s a step two later, we’ll see how this goes, where we open some others within the county.”
Goff said officials will monitor traffic patterns and waste accumulation at the expanded sites to see if the change relieves pressure on other centers. He said the county is specifically looking to see if the heavy volume at the Bakers Crossroads location spreads out more evenly across a six-day week.
“We’re interested to see how the flow changes with this, how it affects the other centers that aren’t open six days a week, how the trash may accumulate at a higher rate at these centers compared to others, and just kind of see which centers this takes pressure off of, and where we start to see the most traffic, and a lot of that is yet to be determined,” Goff said. “So we’re just going to kind of watch the numbers and monitor and see, and then we’ll make some decisions as we gather that data.”
Goff said the county has set a target date of Tuesday, December 15, to begin the new schedule. All centers will maintain their current operating hours until Monday, December 14.