Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 26, 1994 TAG: 9403260075
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LON WAGNER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The teal carpet in the boardroom - and throughout the offices - accentuates the mahogany-colored wooden trim and furniture. An 18-foot teak table spans the boardroom, where people sitting in meetings can look outside through a tall, arched window.
Welcome to Garbage Central Station, better known as the Roanoke regional trash-transfer station.
"Pretty good looking building for trash, isn't it?" said John Birckhead, Roanoke County's director of real estate assessments. "You don't even want to say `trash' when you're in it."
Birckhead wasn't being critical; as a resident of Bradshaw Road - the address of Smith Gap Landfill - he saw firsthand the public outrage that erupts around waste disposal.
He sees the $4.5 million spent on the building - plus another $1.8 million to buy the land, design the building and install utilities - as the cost of making a trash-transfer station acceptable to the surrounding community.
John Hubbard, director of the Roanoke Valley Resource Authority, got a deal on the teak table when a Wall Street firm got rid of it. But some question the rest of the plush offices.
Roanoke County Supervisor Harry Nickens said the transfer station is too fancy for its industrial surroundings and was needlessly expensive.
"Just looking at it from the outside," Nickens said, "it could fit in next to the Dominion Tower building.
"I would conjecture it is probably the most attractive trash-receiving station in the country."
The transfer station is not yet operating, but a city reception there Thursday night gave some residents a first look inside the building. The resource authority - funded by Roanoke County, Roanoke and Vinton - used a $42 million bond issue to build the transfer station, a tipper building on Bradshaw Road in Roanoke County and the landfill.
Garbage trucks will haul trash into the transfer station and dump it onto the cement floor. A front-end loader then will push the garbage into holes at one side of the floor. Parked below will be rail cars, which will haul the trash to the tipper building at the landfill.
So, the transfer station is divided: The bulk of it is the dumping and loading platform; the remainder is the authority's office.
Some Roanoke County supervisors balked at the expensive architectural features - the steep roof pitch, the brick facade - when the transfer station was being discussed.
"You'd expect a facility designed to handle trash would look pretty functional," board member Lee Eddy said. "Some parts of it didn't end up that way."
Nickens said he was not opposed to paying for something compatible with its surroundings, but he did not see any reason for the station to look like a shining monument in a heavy industrial area.
"Look at the homes people are building," he said. "They're not using brick - they're using siding to keep the cost down. Not here."
The station was designed to resemble a Norfolk and Western Railway building from the early 1900s. Carolyn Wagner, public information officer for the authority, said the idea behind the design was to "change the image of trash."
"We're trying to solve a problem and do it in a tasteful way," Wagner said.
Bob Roberts, an engineer with Blacksburg's Olver Inc., helped design the building. He said it could have been constructed less expensively out of prefabricated metal. But, Roberts said, it would have looked like a warehouse.
"I don't think it's overly lavish," Roberts said. "In a lot of cities, you're going to see transfer stations that are built in downtown areas, and, in most cases, you're not going to know it's a transfer station."
Nickens said he sees no need to spend money to dress up something everybody knows isn't pretty.
"Whatever you call it," he said, "it's still trash."
by CNB