County Commission | The Magazine April 2017 | Page 37

NEWS YOU CAN USE
Tindell credits his assistants who oversee
the three departments: Marty Lentz at assistant
engineer, Mike Thornton in environmental services
and Todd Rugg in buildings and grounds. Thornton,
the newbie of the bunch, has only 17 years with the
county.
As for himself, Tindell is eligible to retire if he
wants. He has also worked as assistant engineer
in Cherokee, Geneva and Coffee counties as well
as a few years as engineer in his native Geneva
County. He says he is invested in seeing several
current projects through – or at least well into
implementation.
Highways
Coffee County’s highway department has
responsibility for nearly 800 miles of roadways
(about 70 percent paved) and 154 bridge structures,
but it is almost impossible to have a conversation
about the transportation infrastructure without
talking about natural disasters. Tindell said he’s
worked through at least a dozen that were federally
declared.
At the moment, the department is still making
repairs stemming from the December 2015 floods
that caused widespread damage throughout the
state.
“The rainfall amount was just a grunt more than
1990,” he said. That year, miles and miles of county
roads were destroyed and Elba flooded so badly
that there was a serious conversation about moving
the whole town to higher ground.
But 25 years later, “we withstood it a
whole lot better,” Tindell said.
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Environmental Services
Though the county’s environmental
programs are multi-faceted, it is the landfill
operation that has drawn Tindell into
state policy discussions about solid waste
management. ACCA tapped him to serve
on a task force working on reforms to the
landfill permitting process, and legislation
is pending.
Today the county’s subtitle D landfill
serves about a dozen counties in the
Wiregrass. Opened in 1993 during Mark
Pool’s tenure as engineer, it was the
first landfill in Alabama to meet modern
environmental standards. A gas collection
system was voluntarily installed in the last
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