Over the past few months, the pandemic has upended life and the economy. But one thing hasn’t changed: the city-parish is still looking for a home for a controversial tire shredder.
At Wednesday’s Metro Council meeting, Council member Trae Welch will introduce a measure to rescind the most recent planned location for the shredder—a tract of city-parish property in unincorporated north Baton Rouge just outside Baker city limits.
Earlier this year, Mayor Sharon Weston Broome’s office and Welch identified the property as a potentially ideal location after two other potential sites fell through.
But at a community meeting earlier this summer to discuss locating the shredder at the north maintenance lot, residents of a nearby subdivision turned out to oppose the plans, complaining about the noise, potential traffic and environmental issues a tire shredding facility could pose.
“Nobody wants it,” says Chief Administrative Officer Darryl Gissel. “So we’re now hoping to find a commercial site but there aren’t a lot of options.”
The parish Mosquito Abatement and Rodent Control district received $605,000 in 2019 from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to purchase the shredder, which, it was hoped, would cut down on the waste tires that serve as breeding ponds for disease-carrying mosquitoes.
Several council members also championed the project as a way to clean up the blighted lots in north Baton Rouge that serve as dumping grounds for waste tires.
But without a home for the shredder, the parish is in danger of losing the federal grant, which is being administered by the state.
Originally, the grant required a location be secured by June 30. The CDC has since extended the deadline to Sept. 1 because of the pandemic, MARC Executive Director Randy Vaeth says.
But Sept. 1 is just 40 days away, and Vaeth is not terribly optimistic a new site for the shredder will be found by then.
“No one really anticipated the political pressure we’ve encountered and it seems like it’s just been one roadblock after another,” he says. “It doesn’t look good at this point. We will probably lose the funding.”
Since the funding passes through the state, however, Vaeth hopes state officials will be able to redirect the money to another similar program.
How bad would a loss of the shredder be to the parish’s mosquito control efforts?
It’s hard to say, says Vaeth, but anything that reduces the source of mosquitoes is a help, particularly since many MARC employees were placed on administrative leave during the lockdown phase of the pandemic and were unable to treat breeding pools in waste tires.
“A tire shredder is what we call source reduction and if we could eliminate some of the sources it would be really nice,” he says. “Because so many people were on administrative leave we lost some of our people who were treating the tires so we’re a little behind.”
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