Thanks to a permit approved Monday by Windsor Township, York County's largest tire pile should be history before next year's West Nile virus season peaks in August.
One condition of the junkyard permit, said Marlene Workinger, township manager, is that all of the more than 100,000 old tires piled and buried at the site must be removed by June 30, 2002.
David Simon, president of JKLM Corp., said the firm is working with the property's current and former owners to dispose of the old tires. Simon said he could provide no timetable other than to pledge that the old tires will be removed by the end of June.
"Our job is to assist all the parties and make sure this is going to occur," Simon said Nov. 8, "and we have assured the township that that will get done."
Additional conditions of the permit for the site, Workinger said, require JKLM Corp. to: begin removing scrap metal and an old office trailer from the site this month and complete that cleanup by the end of the year; and set up shrubbery and fencing as a screen on the Route 124 side of the property, which is surrounded on three sides by Modern Landfill.
The permit expires June 30.
Under its lease with Route 124 Auto Parts, Simon said, JKLM Corp. - which operates recycling companies in Williamsport, Coatesville and Baltimore - will run a general junk and scrap business with a primary focus on metal recycling. As it does at its other locations, Simon said, JKLM will recycle metals by using the eddy current system, which Simon described as a "relatively new technology" that separates non-ferrous metal from non-metallic materials. Non-ferrous metals are those that do not contain iron.
Simon said that JKLM, which incorporated in York this year but has been in the scrap and recycling business for years, plans to make its business in Windsor Township work.
"We're not there just for the exercise," Simon said. "We plan to be there for quite some time." York Record