Knox explores building its own salt shed on county suggestion
— Photo from Google Street View
The salt shed, at left, behind the county's garage on Township Road in Knox, is shared by Albany County and the town of Knox.
KNOX — The town of Knox is considering building its own salt shed after running into conflicts with Albany County over the facility that the two share.
Supervisor Russ Pokorny said that, based on a conversation he had with Knox Highway Superintendent Matthew Schanz, who could not be reached by The Enterprise, there are a “number of reasons” why the partnership isn’t working.
One is that the town and county seem to have different ways of tracking how much salt is used, Pokorny said, which “creates difficulty in reconciling the whole thing.”
It’s also inconvenient for the town to have to coordinate pickups with the county, Pokorny said, and to make the trip to fill town trucks.
“It requires a lot of coordination and a lot of cooperation and a lot of accounting, and I think that the guys kind of reached the end of their rope at some point in the last few weeks,” he said. “They just were having trouble reconciling it and they finally just concluded … that we really need to go our own way because we can’t seem to keep this straight anymore.”
County spokeswoman Mary Rozak did not confirm or elaborate on Pokorny’s statements, saying only, “We have a usage agreement with the town and are currently auditing that usage.”
Pokorny said that Schanz has devised a plan to build a shed out of concrete “mafia blocks” at the town’s highway department, a project that Pokorny said would probably cost between $15,000 and $20,000.
“We would need about 72 of them, and what we would do is pile them four high and have three 30-foot walls … so the building would be about 30x30x30,” he said.
Pokorny said the cost estimate is “assuming that Matt and his guys do the work, which I think it’d be better if they do.”
He said that the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation has already signed off verbally on Schanz’s plan, so “we shouldn’t have any trouble with that, environmentally.”
Pokorny said he thinks it’s a “real step forward because it’s going to make life a lot easier for us to just load our own salt and sand and mix it the way we want to and keep track of it.”
