The Fayetteville City Council held a special meeting last night to select a contractor to help clean up the piles and piles and piles of downed trees and limbs that are lining nearly every street in Fayetteville, and have selected two bids so we can finally start getting Fayetteville back to awesome again.

Solid Resources Inc., a company from Sarasota, Fla. will get $483,690, and DRC Emergency Services will get $2,419,185.64, with 400,000 of that to clean up the cities parks.

The council approved a $4 million dollar budget appropriation to pay for the ice storm recovery, $3 million of that will be reimbursed by FEMA, 500,000 will come from the state of Arkansas, and Fayetteville will be left with the remaining $500,000 bill.

Don Marr, mayor Jordan’s chief of staff said the cleanup will begin within the next 48 hours. But don’t think all those limbs will be gone overnight.

Dave Jurgens, water and wastewater director for the city, estimates the cleanup will take about 3 months. The contractors will begin going street by street, and will return to each area two times to allow residents to further chop up their limbs as needed, and to bring additional debris to the curb as needed. The debris will be recycled, and used to create mulch (a whole lot of mulch) for landscaping city parks or for sale to the public, and the rest might be sold to paper companies, or to the public for firewood, etc.

A schedule of where the contractors will be working will be published on a weekly basis will be published in the Northwest Arkansas Times, and on the city website.