Perhaps one of the most utilized but underappreciated departments in Monroe County is the one that is located farthest away from the rest.
The Monroe County Landfill has been in quiet operation on Strickland Loop off Hwy. 83 North since 1993 and for most of the 27 years since its construction, lifelong Monroe County resident Frank Newton has served as its hard-working supervisor.
Newton is one of Monroe County’s longest-tenured employees, having worked for the county for 34 years, including nearly 25 as the landfill supervisor.
Newton, the son of the late Charles “Sonny” Newton Jr. and Jane Roquemore Newton, began his career with the county as an 18-year-old in 1984 when he was hired by former road superintendent Brack Goolsby to mow grass on the county’s right-of-way crew.
Even as a teenager, Newton was no stranger to hard work. He worked for his uncle on his family’s dairy farm while attending high school at Mary Persons. He recalled one time his father urged him to see if any of his football teammates wanted to assist him on the farm during a hot summer in the early 1980s.
“When I started playing football, we were bailing squares of hay,” Newton said. “My daddy said, ‘Ask them if any of them want to work during the day.’ Because we were practicing at 7 in the morning and 7 in the evening. I think we had seven people on the back of the truck when we left that first day, but the next day I don’t think we had but two.”
Upon graduating high school, Newton’s friend, Clint McCullough, told him of an opening in the county road department, and he quickly applied.
Newton joked, “I always told Brack (Goolsby) that he wouldn’t hire anymore young folks after he hired me. I must have set a bad example.”
By the early 1990s, Newton had worked his way up to a heavy equipment operator at the road department. But something unexpected occurred that changed the path of his career. The City of Forsyth and Monroe County formerly shared a landfill on Old Brent Road. However, the City of Forsyth decided to sell the facility, leaving the county without a location to dump its trash. While having to haul Monroe County trash to Butts and Crawford counties, respectively, the county spent two years building its own landfill at its present-day Strickland Loop location. When the landfill was complete in 1993, Newton was one of four road department employees, along with Robert Gaines, Darren Ramsey and Carl Sanders, who were re-assigned to full-time landfill duty. Two of the original four, Newton and Ramsey, are still operating the landfill nearly three decades later.
In that time, the county’s waste management service has grown from a single recycling center in High Falls in 1992 to a thriving landfill with 22 separate 37,500 square-foot cells that held over 30,000 tons of trash in 2019 in addition to 13 recycling centers strategically positioned in all parts of the county.
Newton, who was promoted to landfill supervisor in the late 1990s, said he and his four-person staff, consisting of Jermaine Butler, Ramsey, Beth Selman and Brandon White, are out there every day by themselves doing “what you’ve got to do” to keep the landfill operational.
“Whatever it takes to keep the gate open,” Newton said of his daily job responsibilities. “Today, I was loading cover dirt. Tomorrow I might be on the bulldozer compactor or in the office doing paperwork. Just whatever needs to be done. I tell them (employees) I’m just like them. The only difference is when something goes wrong, I’m the one they come looking for. That’s the only difference.”
Occasionally, the job can be dangerous. Newton said earlier this month a fire ignited after a roll-off truck driver dumped unknown chemicals that a citizen had cleaned out of a home and barn.
Newton said, “A guy dumped a load, and once he dumped it, Rerun (Butler) came in with a compactor and luckily he didn’t push it and drive over it. He dropped the blade and was going to drag it back and when he did, dust started flying up and fire went everywhere. We didn’t know what it was. We didn’t know what kind of chemicals. We just put it out by covering it with dirt. We actually pushed it out of the trash and covered it up with dirt because we didn’t want it to spread.”
But Newton said the hardest part of working at the landfill is bad weather that makes for a messy occupation.
“The rain, it makes it a muddy mess out there,” Newton said. “You just blade it off or put rock down or whatever and hope for the best. It isn’t as bad if it rains during the night, but if it rains during the day when the trucks are running, it really gets dirt up there. But we try to maintain the roads where we can handle it.”
Newton said perhaps the most notable weather-related happening occurred when the infamous Flood of 1994 drowned parts of Monroe County. Newton said the year-old landfill never stopped operating but it made for some memorable days.
“It was unreal out there. It got to the point where we couldn’t run a compactor,” Newton said. “The trash was just floating. It went on about a week. We stayed open through the whole thing. Back then we didn’t even have cabs on the tractors, so we were just sitting in the rain all day every day. We tried rain suits, but you’d sweat so bad you’d might as well sit in the rain.”
Newton and his landfill team spend much less time out in the elements these days. They now have an old Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) trailer purchased after Hurricane Katrina that is used as a scale house.
Newton said the trailer is fully-furnished and even had a new air conditioner installed in it earlier this month.
“We’ve got a kitchen table, refrigerator, microwave, the whole nine yards,” he said.
Newton also got further help from the rain when Monroe County Commissioners bought the landfill a Caterpillar articulated dump truck back in March.
“We finally got an off-road truck thanks to (County Manager) Mr. (Jim) Hedges,” Newton said. “It’ll cover dirt. It’ll run in inclement weather. It’s six-wheel drive. It’ll keep going unless it gets extremely bad.”
Away from work, Newton enjoys spending time with his family, which includes his wife of 18 years, Chasity, a hairdresser at Macon’s Fringe Salon, as well as his two daughters, Dani Newton, who works for Zachry Group out of Georgia Power, and Madison Bradford, an emergency room nurse at Macon’s Medical Center Navicent Health. The Newtons also adopted their two grandsons, Cayden, 10, and Cruz, 8, after Newton’s other daughter, Demi Collier, passed away in 2016.
