With less than two weeks until the April 8 total solar eclipse, county officials are finalizing plans for managing the number of visitors anticipated to flock to the area for the celestial event.
Administrative offices for Garland County will be closed on Monday, April 8, County Judge Darryl Mahoney said.
"Our essential personnel, our 911, our sheriff's office, those will continue to operate," he said. "There's not going to be any offices here at the courthouse open that day. I'll be here just monitoring the phone and where I have a landline, just in case we lose cell service that day."
There will not be any trash collection on April 8, either, Mahoney said. Commercial trash collection, which is primarily done Monday through Friday, will be extended through April 7.
"Republic Services in Bauxite, where we take our Class 1 waste to, which is household trash, food, stuff like that, they're going to stay open all weekend, so that we can do multiple commercial pickups over the weekend on Saturday and Sunday," he said. "We will transfer that waste to Bauxite, hoping to get everything we collect over the weekend to Bauxite by the end of business on Sunday. On Monday, we're not going to be running any commercial or house-to-house pick-up, and the landfill will be closed as well. We're trying to keep as much stuff off the street as we can."
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With the anticipated influx of visitors, businesses could have more trash than usual leading up to the eclipse, he said.
"There might be multiple times that we have to pick up over the weekend commercially," he said. "Let's just say, your restaurants, for example, or something of that nature, they might have an overflow of trash -- more than they're generally used to, which would not be compatible with just having one dumpster," Mahoney said.
"So we've been reaching out to our commercial customers letting them know what our plan is, and we plan to try to pick it up as much as we need to to keep it off the streets."
Mahoney said the plan is for trash collection to resume on Tuesday, April 9, with both normal Monday and Tuesday routes to be picked up that day.
"They're not going to run on Monday, and we believe it's more convenient to the homeowner if we do the Monday pick-up on Tuesday rather than trying to do it early because they would wind up with a long period before we could get back to them," he said.
"So hopefully they will be able to cover house-to-house pick-up on Monday and Tuesday on Tuesday itself, and then we'll go back to our regular commercial routes on Tuesday. But we plan to pick up however much we need to over the weekend and try to get all that trash transferred to Bauxite, so that we don't have a big load in our transfer stations in our trailers waiting to go Tuesday morning so that we can kind of start fresh because we know Tuesday will be a heavy day."
The county street department will be lightly staffed on April 8, but it will be for emergencies only, Mahoney said.
"I'll have a few team leaders at the road department just in case we get a tree down or we have an emergency of some kind," he said. "Let's just say a culvert caves in or something of that nature happens, we'll have a few folks stationed at the road department, so that they can go out in the need of an emergency. Otherwise, we're not going to have our offices open."
Mahoney said the biggest concern as far as traffic appears to be Monday afternoon and into the evening.
"One of our biggest concerns is the booking of hotel rooms for Monday night," he said. "They're way down from what they are on Sunday night, so we believe that instead of people staying here that week, once it's over, they're going to try to get out of here. That's where our concern of gridlock is mainly on Monday afternoon and Monday evening."
Mahoney also noted they moved the quorum court meeting, originally set for April 8, to the next day "because it could be some of the most difficult times."