KNOX — The town of Knox has decided on a permanent design for its transfer station. 

At a special meeting last week, the town board agreed to circumvent the “big excavation and foundation work” and go with a simple pavilion that will house compactors and office space, Supervisor Russ Pokorny told The Enterprise. 

“We decided to abandon the hopper and pit concept in favor of an Alaskan slab, which would be poured over the site of the existing pit,” Pokorny wrote in an email, answering questions from The Enterprise. “The Alaskan slab would have a 40 foot by 48 foot pavilion built over it that would house the two mobile compactor units we are now using for solid waste.  These two units would be redeployed for cardboard and commingled recyclables.”

Pokorny said the town will also use a new stationary compactor identical to the one used by Westerlo, which will be accessible to the public from two sides. 

The simple design is “pretty complete,” he said, and so shouldn’t require any additional work for the foreseeable future. 

“The one thing we aren’t doing that we thought we might do was create a garage, so to speak, for the truck … ,” Pokorny said. “That’s something we might want to look at sometime in the future, but we don’t really know.”

Since the town board announced that it would have to overhaul the transfer station because of a weakening foundation, Knox residents have been adjusting to a temporary setup that uses two self-compacting Dumpsters and a job trailer for employees. 

Pokorny acknowledged earlier this month that there was a learning curve involved with the new arrangement but that residents had pretty much figured it out, and that there had been very few complaints. 

Following a minimally productive meeting earlier in the month, Pokorny said he was pleasantly surprised to emerge from last week’s special meeting with a design concept, having thought there was a possibility that the board would have to “have a meeting every Wednesday night forever” to solve the transfer station problem. 

It’s also expected that this design will be able to be implemented more cheaply than some of the other, more involved ideas that had been floated. 

The town still has to get the plans drawn up before it can put out a request for proposals, but Pokorny said he doesn’t think it will be “so horrendously expensive.”

The open design means there’s no need for garage doors, which would have added “a lot of construction complexity,” he said. 

“And it’s going to hold up better down the line,” he also said. “Drainage is always a problem when you create something below grade. I think [the design] is better. I’m a lot happier with it. I think it's going to be simpler and easier to maintain.”