You may know that Guilford County will take scrap tires off your hands, but you probably have no idea what happens to them after that.
Well, Guilford County takes those tires and hands them over to a private company – Central Carolina Tire Disposal – and pays the company over $800,000 a year to make those tires disappear.
On Thursday, May 20, the Guilford County Board of Commissioners is expected to enter into a new contract for the coming fiscal year with Central Carolina Holdings, L.L.C. – a company that’s doing business as Central Carolina Tire Disposal.
The contract allows for up to $868,200 of taxpayer money to be used to dispose of tires during the 2021-2022 fiscal year, which begins on July 1 and runs through June 30 of next year. This is the first of three optional one-year renewals of the initial contract that the Guilford County Board of Commissioners approved last year around this time with the same company.
Inflation might be heating up across a lot of categories these days. However, when it comes to the cost of getting rid of used tires, the county won’t see much of a price hike. For a passenger car tire, the cost to taxpayers is going from 88 cents per tire to 90 cents, and, for truck tires, that price is going from $4.47 to $4.61. There’s an additional fee for the county when car or truck tires are abnormally large.
The contract calls for the tires to be disposed of in “a lawful manner acceptable to the county” and it also conveys Guilford County’s concerns about green government. It states that Central Carolina Tire Disposal “will completely recycle the tires to the fullest extent feasible.”
