Staff graphic, Todd Gill

Fayetteville residents will soon have a new – and possibly more convenient – location to drop off recyclable materials.

Planning commissioners on Monday unanimously approved a conditional use permit for a community recycling drop-off facility on the south side of North Street, directly west of the Scull Creek trail crossing.

Cars pass by the site of a planned recycling drop-off facility on the south side of North Street Monday evening.

Photo: Todd Gill

According to planning documents, the roughly 0.75-acre site will be similar to the recycling drop-off facility at 1420 S. Happy Hollow Road, and will include a paved area with eight large containers for residents to recycle glass, aluminum, plastic and paper products.

City planner Jesse Fulcher said a decorative fence would likely be built around the site.

“You want security, but you also want visibility,” said Fulcher. “You want the public to be able to see this as they walk and drive by, and realize that it’s a facility that’s open to the public.”

Fulcher said while a recycling drop-off isn’t necessarily the most attractive use of the city-owned property, it’s still a very important use for the community, especially considering the large amount of nearby apartments whose residents don’t have access to the city’s curbside recycling program.

Terry Gulley, the city’s Transportation Services director, said the plan is to make the area as attractive as possible. “We’ll be there early enough every morning that if someone left some trash there the night before, we’ll be able to keep it cleaned up,” said Gulley. “We think we can be good neighbors and provide a service that is direly missing in that area.”

Tom Pevehouse, owner of the North Street Mini Mart across the street from the site of the planned recycling facility, said he was against building a drop-off in that location because he thought it would create traffic problems.

Gulley said he disagreed and noted that he’s never seen more than six or seven cars inside the city’s other drop-off site at one time. “I’ve never seen a line of traffic waiting to get in there,” he said.

The North Street facility replaces immediate plans for a larger drop-off site near the city’s Westside Wastewater Treatment Plant on Broyles Avenue.

According to Don Marr, the mayor’s chief of staff, bids for the Broyles Avenue facility came in at more than double the $400,000 budgeted for the project. Marr said the decision was made to find an alternate location for a smaller facility in order to speed up the process of adding a second drop-off site for Fayetteville residents.

Marr said the larger site could still be added in the future.