By Terry Witt – Spotlight Senior Reporter

            The annual Levy County Tire Amnesty Day is just around the corner.

            Residents of Levy County can bring their used car and pickup tires to the Levy County Landfill free of charge from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, April 8.

            Rod Hastings, administrative director of the landfill, said employees will check the identification of drivers to determine if they are Levy County residents.

            Hastings said residents can bring up to 25 tires in one load on Amnesty Day but he said sometimes people abuse the rules. The wife will arrive with 25 tires and her husband will come back later with an additional 25.

            The county discourages double-dipping like that.

            “It’s to help all the people in Levy County, not just the Jethros that let it pile up in the yard,” Hastings said. “We take the tires, but we try to discourage it.”

            Amnesty Day is funded with a $25,000 state recycling grant. The county pays the cost of recycling the tires and is reimbursed later by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.

            Hastings said landfill employees will accept most forms of identification including home ownership and driver’s licenses. He said they aren’t picky, but the end goal is to allow only Levy County residents to drop off tires.

            He anticipates 4 ½ to 5 ½ semi-loads of waste tires will be brought to the landfill. More tires than that were brought to last year’s event. He said one of the aims of the program is to get all the tires out of the woods.

            “It should be helping, but it’s kind of like okra, it just keeps coming back,” he said.

            In case anyone’s interested, the landfill isn’t called the landfill anymore. It’s called Levy County Solid Waste and Recycling, but some people still call it the landfill, and others refer to it as the dump.

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Board of County Commission Regular Meeting March 21, 2023; Posted March 27, 2023