For two decades, a steady procession of trucks hauling trash visited the Dyer Boulevard Landfill site until it closed in 1989.
By mid-1996, officials at the Palm Beach County Solid Waste Authority hope to see traffic flowing once again onto the inactive 445-acre landfill west of Riviera Beach.
But they want the visitors this time to be people in cars, toting picnic lunches, baseball gloves, canoes and bikes.
In April, bulldozers will start crawling across the site. Instead of burying trash there, the earth movers will begin the job of turning about one-half the landfill site into a park.
Included in the first phase are two baseball diamonds and four soccer fields, a picnic area, lakes for boating, hiking trails and walking paths and a mountain bike challenge course.
“We expect in about 18 months to have the basic recreational facilities in,” said John Booth, the waste authority’s director of engineering.
Parks have been built atop buried trash before in Palm Beach County – Dreher Park in West Palm Beach and Miller Park in Delray Beach, for instance. Landfills in Dade and St. Lucie counties have been groomed into golf courses.
But the underpinnings of South Florida’s current landfill/park sites are small municipal dumps shut down many years ago. The Dyer park project may create one of the first parks in the state built on a large, modern closed landfill, Booth said.
The waste authority, not the county parks department, is going to pay the $5 million tab to develop the park. The money was required under a deal the waste authority struck to buy several chunks of the landfill site that the county did not own after the agency assumed control of all county dumps in 1983.
The parcels were bought from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which extracted a promise from the waste authority to turn the landfill into a park, Booth said. Some of the cost to build the park will be shouldered by others. After the first-phase features are completed, the waste authority will look to private vendors and organizations to add a 9-hole golf course, a BMX race track and an air strip.
The county Parks and Recreation Department gave input on the park’s master plan, completed by the Orlando consulting firm HOH Associates Inc. The department will groom and maintain the grounds under a contract with the waste authority.
But the waste authority plans to put its stamp on the park by making it a recycling “showcase,” using compost, mulch and plastic lumber and other recycled materials wherever possible in its construction, Booth said.
County parks Superintendent Bill Wilsher said the landfill, which accepted county waste from 1968 to 1989, should fill an important recreational need in central and north Palm Beach county.
“Most of the municipalities in that area have switched a lot of their adult fields over to youth [fields),” he said. “Because of that we have pushed out young adult and even adult activities. What we’re looking for this facility to do is fill that gap.”
Plans show the park spread largely across open spaces where no solid waste is buried – areas in-between and surrounding four landfill “cells.”
That open land includes stormwater drainage areas, retention ponds and equipment storage areas, said Marc Bruner, the waste authority’s director of environmental programs.
The site’s newer waste-burial areas, including the landfill’s main repository, a 100-foot hill of trash spread over 90 acres – will remain off-limits to the public for several more years because some of the trash buried there is still settling and venting flammable methane gas.
The gas, produced by decomposing garbage, is directed into an underground system of pipes and channeled to a 30-foot “flare” or flame tower, where it is burned off.
All four landfill cells are capped with a plastic liner. On top of that is a two-foot layer of soil and grass.
