FAIRMONT — Light it up.

That is the Fairmont City Council’s general opinion as a short-term remedy to the overflowing tree dump, but possible long-term solutions, such as monitoring the site also were discussed at Monday’s meeting.

This past weekend, three council members — Wayne Hasek, Bruce Peters and Randy Lubenow — made trips to the tree dump, located off County Road 39 at Lair Road and 100th Street. They agreed the space was full and that burning it seemed like the best option.

“If we had a storm come up this summer, we’re going to have no place to put all that wood,” Hasek said.

Troy Nemmers, city engineer/public works director, said city crews pushed back piles and tried to clean up the area on Friday, but with people doing yard work, tree trimming and spring cleanup, it was filled in again by Sunday.

For more than a year, the city has had a contract with a grinding company that transforms the tree debris into wood chips, but the volume of limbs deposited at the site makes it difficult for the grinder to keep up, let alone made headway.

The council previously discussed the overflowing tree dump last October, when it weighed the options of bringing in another wood chipper or burning the site over the winter. At the time, Nemmers said the city maintains a burn permit with the DNR, and while burning was an option, it was not the preferred method of disposal.

Nemmers said he has been working with Nick Lardy, park and street superintendent, to develop a plan to educate people who use the dump site.

“We’re going to put together a policy with better detail on what should be done, who should be dumping out there and who shouldn’t be,” he said.

One problem arises when people dump contraband refuse at the site, as happened this past weekend.

“City crews went out and hauled two dump truck loads of old wood from an old shed that was dumped out there,” Nemmers said. “As the abuse continues, the challenges increase, and the capacity of the site backslides.”

Tom Hawkins offered another reason for the site’s overuse.

“It’s not just the city of Fairmont that’s using it. People all over the county are using it. A lot of tree (service) people are using it, even though they do business in other communities outside of Fairmont,” he said.

Hawkins said he has talked to non-residents who have used the site.

“They said there’s really no other place in the county to go with it, that it’s a great place to go,” he said.

He proposed investigating a partnership with the county that would make the site available for all county residents to use. Other options would be to set up a monitoring system or installing a gate to limit access to certain supervised hours to make sure only Fairmont residents are using the site.

“The whole county, anybody who knows about it, uses it, whether they live in Fairmont or not. If you don’t monitor it, you’re going to have the whole county, maybe even out of the county,” Hawkins said. “It’s a major mess.”

He agreed that burning it would be a short-term solution, but getting the county involved or some type of monitoring is needed for the long term.

Fairmont residents pay $2 per month on their utility bills with those funds supporting the citywide cleanup, fall leaf pickup and tree dump maintenance.

“That’s a relatively small revenue source looking at the capacity and volume of material being handled out there,” Nemmers said.

He said he would work with the fire department about the possibility of burning the site but warned that the window to safely burn such a large mass, which could burn for several days, might have passed until fall.