The past year marked what could one day be remembered as a generational milestone for Cullman County, thanks to a cooperative city-county purchase agreement that saw the transfer of the Cullman County landfill from private to publicly-held hands.

Struck last July, the $27 million purchase deal represented 50/50 buy-in between the City of Cullman and the Cullman County Commission, securing the facility in the southern part of unincorporated Cullman County as the 100-year answer to county residents’ sanitation needs.

County commission chair Jeff Clemons says the purchase is the achievement he’s most proud of during his elected leadership tenure, crediting the landfill’s former owners, as well as his fellow commissioners and Cullman city leaders for having the foresight — and the team spirit — to address an issue that was otherwise all but certain to become an infrastructural pressure point as the Cullman area continues to grow.

“I think it’s the biggest accomplishment that’s been made since I’ve been in office,” said Clemons. “It’s huge. The landfill has a 99-year span of service, and it’s a really big accomplishment for all of the people involved that we worked together and took the best interests of our citizens as the starting point to make it happen. As other counties all around Alabama begin to have problems finding answers for their sanitation, I think people will look back on it as being as big a deal as Duck River or anything else our leaders have done to address a major need.”

The commission has been busy tackling other infrastructure upgrades that fall entirely under its control, including a $5 million project to upgrade the water department’s tower and pumping station in the area near Crane Hill. “We are putting in a bigger pumping station there, where we can pump more water for those areas,” said Clemons. “We have folks out working to install it now. Hopefully, in this coming year, folks in the Crane Hill and Stout’s Mountain area will have a lot more water flow.

“It’s another one of those things that we needed to do because of all the growth Cullman County is experiencing,” he added. “We’re trying to keep our water rates as low as we can, and in the last two years, we haven’t had to go up on those rates. With inflation, everything is going to increase in cost eventually, but by working together with the city, we’re trying to do everything we can to improve the quality of life for our people.”

Last year, the county commission signed off on the development of a five-year plan for the Cullman County Parks and Recreation Department, with a unique array of countywide amenities including Clarkson Covered Bridge, Smith Lake Park, Stony Lonesome OHV Park, Sportsman Lake, and the Cullman County Agricultural Trade Center. Clemons said that work on the plan continues to progress, noting that it will incorporate what’s set to be the parks department’s next major move: a thorough reimagining of the scope of the Agricultural Center.

“The Ag Center is going to be a part of that plan, and we’re currently in the process of working on some improvements that will really breath a kind of new life into that facility,” he said. “We’re also doing a lot of improvements at our other parks; we’re getting ready to add a pickleball court at Smith Lake Park, where we just added a full basketball court there last year. Our tourism board is also paying for internet at Smith Lake Park, which is a really big enhancement to serve all of the major fishing tournaments that the park brings in.”

No matter what improvements the commission might undertake, county roads will always be the topic that preoccupies commissioners from one season to the next. “I get more calls about roads than anything else,” Clemons said, while noting that the current five-member commission — operating under that format for the first full year in 2023 — has identified paving more road miles each year an especially high priority.

“Since I’ve been on the commission, we’ve spent over $15 million in road work — and that’s extra money that the commission has set aside just for roads. With 2,000 miles of road, it does take a long time to get them all into shape. But we’ve been working, over the past several months, to get ready for paving this year. Right now we’re working all over the county to get a lot of our roads based, and we hope, if weather permits, to pave about 40 miles of road this year. In years past, the county was lucky to pave maybe 15 miles a year. We got close to 40 miles last year, and this year our goal is to actually hit that number,” he said.