Work Begins On Asphalt Plant

SEBRING - The first asphalt plant owned and operated by a local government in Florida's history is under construction at the Highlands County Waste Management's 1,000-acre landfill.

Ken Wheeler, director of the county's solid waste management department, said the plant should go into production by late June or early July.

Asphalt paving costs are expected to be reduced between 10 to 20 percent at the plant, which will also add several forms of recycling to Highlands County's waste disposal system.

First, methane gas, produced by garbage decomposing underground at the landfill, will no longer be burned off by flares. Instead, the gas will be used as the fuel to run the asphalt plant.

Also, several scrap materials that are currently not recycled by the county will be recycled to provide lower cost materials to make asphalt. Glass bottles, for instance, will eventually be used in place of sand for the asphalt mix. Not only will that reduce the county's production costs per ton of asphalt, but it also will keep glass bottles from going into the landfill.

Carl Cool, recently retired after 17 years as the county government's chief executive officer, praised both Wheeler and Highlands County Engineer Ramon Gavarrete for working throughout the last year to make the asphalt plant a reality.

Cool, who was the Highlands County engineer before becoming county administrator, said the plant's operation will get better, with lower prices per ton for asphalt, over the next two years.

"You develop and perfect your own recipe for producing asphalt, and it gets better as you go along," Cool said. "By the time the plant operating for two years, they'll have perfected their own recipe and they'll be using more and more recycled materials in the mix, too."

The Project Barely Made It
Wheeler, Gavarrete and Cool were instrumental in convincing the county commissioners to borrow $3.7 million to buy the asphalt plant and get it installed.

Despite heavy lobbying from the Florida Asphalt Pavers Association, the commissioners voted 3 to 2 to go ahead with the project.
A $1.65 million state grant also is reducing the county's cost in half. The state fund came from a special "alternative energy/green energy" pool of state money for "green energy" projects.

Before becoming a reality, the project had to go through some potential hurdles in the state Legislature.

The pavers association, working with state Representative Will Weatherford, R- Wesley Chapel, convinced the Legislature to pass a bill in April that makes it illegal for a city or county to build its own asphalt plant.

Lobbyists for the asphalt pavers said local governments should not compete with private industry, even if the local governments can produce asphalt at a lower cost than private industry.

If the law had passed without any changes, Highlands County still would have had to pay $3.4 million to Gencore Industries Inc., because the county had already ordered the asphalt plant and Gencore was building it.

After Wheeler and Gavarrete made numerous trips to talk with state legislators in Tallahassee, the pavers' bill was amended to make Highlands County the one exception.

State Cut A Second Grant
Wheeler also won a second "alternative energy/green energy" grant from the state until the state legislature ran out of money and cut the grant.

The $1.7 million grant would have paid half the cost of converting the landfill's methane gas into pipeline-quality natural gas to provide low-cost alternative fuel to run the county's vehicle fleet.

Wheeler said the project, including the costs to retrofit county trucks, vans and heavy equipment to run on natural gas, would have saved the county about $1.6 million per year. That would be the savings from using the landfill gas instead of diesel fuel to run the county's fleet.