CITY CORNER by Mayor Brent Hinckley

      During the past few weeks the City has continued to move forward with both of our major projects.   As you are probably aware, the City is working with Texas Water Development Board to fund a water treatment project, and we are in the process of completing the permitting of a new landfill, since the old landfill is rapidly filling up and will need to be closed in a year or so.  The application has been completed for the new permit and was delivered to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality on April 17.  It has already cleared the administrative review, which we anticipated to take 90 days, and is now beginning its technical review.  It is expected that it will be several months before the permit is fully approved and we are ready to consider completing construction and accepting waste.  One of the steps in the process is to notify the community and neighboring property owners to answer any concerns and hopefully gain their support for the project.

     The new landfill location is in the northeast portion of the Industrial Park, set back about four hundred feet from Highway 29, and will provide about twenty-two acres of landfill space, as well as an additional seven acres of disposal for construction debris.  We will be placing a sign in that location identifying it as the site of the new landfill in the next couple of weeks so that everyone can see just where we are planning to place it.  This size landfill will meet the needs of Mason and our residents for many decades to come, and by completing the application now we can avoid some future changes in environmental laws.  There is one significant and costly change in our landfill operations, and that is because we will no longer be considered Arid Exempt.  This means that we will have to have a composite liner below the trash layers to isolate the garbage from the environment and monitor all water that comes in contact with the waste.  Our goal is to plan and provide the very best and up-to-date landfill to meet the needs of our community into the next century. 

     If you would like to examine the entire application it is available at the City office in a hardcopy, or online at www.MasonTxEastLandfill.com however be aware the full application is nearly 1300 pages long.    We also have available a very simplified description of the proposal and some diagrams of the intended layout and location that we are mailing to all property owners within ¼ mile.  If you would like to see this simplified information, we will have it available at the City office or I will be pleased to email it to you if you will contact me at brent.hinckley@cityofmason.us and let me know of your interest.  There is also information on the City website under a tab at the lower left side of the main page.

     Our intention is to fully inform all of the members of our community of the expectations for our new landfill.  One of the greatest obstacles to any new landfill is to meet and respond to any concerns and issues that might come up, and we want to be ahead of that problem by communicating and being transparent with all of our designs and plans.  If you have any suggestions or concerns about our new landfill, please bring your comments to any elected official or our City Administrator so that we might deal with them reasonably.  Mason is a great hometown, and working together we can continue to meet the needs of our City and our County in appropriate and positive ways for generations to come.  Help us provide the future residents of Mason with good garbage disposal so that our town can continue to grow and improve. 

     There is another project that might create some issues as you travel about town.  The City has just begun to remove the low water crossing on Post Oak between Hwy 87 and the Mason Funeral Home.  This crossing has been literally falling apart for the past year or two, and we have had a large steel plate over the road surface to make it passable, but now the time has come to tear it down and rebuild it.  For the next three weeks or so we will be working in that area and Post Oak will be closed, so if you need to drive in that area please be aware and find an alternative route.  It may be inconvenient for a few days, but once rebuilt that “bridge” should last and be a benefit to our community for many, many years.  If you have a problem with this or any other issue in the City, please let us know and we will see how we can best address the problem.