Long-awaited tire cutter arrives at City Yard

The City of Olney took delivery last week of its long-awaited tire cutter, which will sit at the Olney Convenience Station when it is assembled and tested, City Administrator Arpegea Pagsuberon said.

The delivery of the blue hydraulic cutter presumably brings the City closer to clearing up a huge tire pile at the abandoned gas station on Main Street. The owner of the gas station had been waiting for the City to receive the tire cutter in order to get a bid on the cost of removing the mountains of discarded tires from the property, Olney Police Chief Dan Birbeck told the City Council last month.

The sale of the foreclosed property at 301 E. Main Street in December startled the Council, which had been planning to take possession of the abandoned gas station in order to clean up the estimated 5,000-8,000 tires piled up around and inside it. The property had been listed multiple times at county foreclosure sales with no takers.

As a condition of the sale, the new property owner, GFF Texas Holdings, agreed to clean up the tires and remove two underground gas tanks after a six-month period during which the former owner could redeem the property. That redemption period expired in June.

Mrs. Pagsuberon said on July 20 that the City would test its capacity to operate the machine by cutting about 350 tires now at the Convenience Station, which is limited by state environmental rules to accumulating more than 500 tires at a time.

“We are going to start there,” she said. “That’s going to let us know approximately how many they can do in a day [and] give us an idea of how long it is going to take to complete that project.”

She cautioned that “we don’t truly know how many tires there are [at the gas station]” so the clean-up may take longer than anticipated.

“We haven’t seen too many [tires at the gas station] with rims. That’s going to be a problem if they have a rim on them. There’s a lot more work behind it. We know it cuts regular tires and over-the-road passenger tires but we’re not sure about the farm tires,” she said. “They told us it would.”

The City will charge the new owner, Jocelyn Shelton, the standard rates for disposing of tires that are listed on the City’s Facebook page, she said. Ms. Shelton also will pay for a roll-off dumpster to hold the quartered tires and for the labor of a Public Works employee, she said.

The Public Works employee can transport 10 tires at a time, “so he can spend a day transporting as many tires as we can in a day - up to 500 and then he can spend a day cleaning them up and [putting] them in the dumpster,” Mrs. Pagsuberon said.

The City has no plans to allow residents to bring discarded tires to the Convenience Station for free disposal during an amnesty period, she said. “We no longer have a grant that is going to pay for everything … so we are no longer offering that unfortunately.”

After cleaning up Olney’s tire problem, the City could loan the tire cutter to other cities for a price – “if they have their own scrap tire facility,” Mrs. Pagsuberon said, adding that only Olney residents will be able to bring their tires to the Convenience Station for cutting.

“Our Convenience Station is limited solely to our residents,” she said. “We are not supposed to be using it for businesses or industries. We are very limited as to what can be done at the Convenience Station.”