Conway’s chief of staff to fill sanitation spot

In this 2012 photo, Cheryl Harrington stands in front of 11,000 pounds of glass to be recycled. Harrington, 50, died March 12 after a 15-year battle with cancer. She had been director of sanitation since 2003. Jack Bell, 62, chief of staff for the city of Conway, was tapped earlier this month by Mayor Tab Townsell to serve as interim director. Bell will continue to represent the city on committees and fulfill some of his regular duties, Townsell said. Both men said it will be hard to replace Harrington, who expanded and improved the department through the years.
In this 2012 photo, Cheryl Harrington stands in front of 11,000 pounds of glass to be recycled. Harrington, 50, died March 12 after a 15-year battle with cancer. She had been director of sanitation since 2003. Jack Bell, 62, chief of staff for the city of Conway, was tapped earlier this month by Mayor Tab Townsell to serve as interim director. Bell will continue to represent the city on committees and fulfill some of his regular duties, Townsell said. Both men said it will be hard to replace Harrington, who expanded and improved the department through the years.

CONWAY — Jack Bell of Conway, the city’s chief of staff, has been an educator and an alderman, and is now interim director of the city’s sanitation department.

Bell, 62, was tapped by Mayor Tab Townsell to temporarily replace Cheryl Harrington, 50, who died March 12. Harrington had been at the helm of the department since 2003.

“He just asked me to do it, and I was agreeable to do it,” Bell said. “We work with all departments, and I’m fairly familiar with that department. It won’t be a real long-term thing. They’ve got an extremely, extremely dedicated staff; the staff is great.”

Bell said his salary will not change. He is already chairman of the Faulkner County Solid Waste Management District, of which Harrington was director. Bell’s office is in City Hall; Harrington’s office was at the sanitation department on U.S. 64 in Conway.

“I’ll split time between both offices,” Bell said. “Early on, I’ll probably be out there more because I need to learn about the budget and the operations.”

Bell said his college degree is in psychology. “Maybe that’ll help a little bit,” he said.

Townsell said Bell was available to take on the interim position.

“He’s familiar with both the people and, to a degree, the operations out there,” Townsell said. “He won’t physically move his office out there for a while,” he said, adding that Bell will continue to represent the city in meetings.

The chief of staff is “a catch-all extra person on hand for anything that comes through the mayor’s office, whether that’s administrative, whether it’s political in nature,” Townsell said. Bell is responsible for “a host of things — things we’ll have to pick up. He handles a lot of calls and requests to come into the office, or looks over special projects to some degree.”

Bell said he would meet with sanitation-department supervisors. He said Harrington had developed a senior staff “that is very knowledgeable and efficient.”

“She had a great background,” Bell said. Harrington had been the Pine Bluff Sanitation Department director, beginning in 2000. When she came to Conway, she revamped the department and increased its programs.

“She had really grown the department, and not only grown it but created just a great atmosphere — a lot of pride in the program throughout the staff. I really feel like they have a lot of pride in what they do and take their jobs seriously and strive to do good customer service.”

Townsell called Harrington the “consummate department head and sanitation director.”

He said that as soon as Harrington was hired, she insisted that the facility stop being referred to as a dump and be called a landfill.

“She dressed things up. She planted flowers, made [employees] wash their vehicles, wipe their feet when they came through the door. She believed in doing a good job and making it tidy and neat. She had a top-to-bottom no-stone-left-unturned approach to sanitation. She brought in a holistic approach to a number of things.” He said the landfill is a major operation by itself, as well as the recycling, billing, routes, collection and reuse center.

“She brought in a lot of those newfangled features. She instituted a lot of innovations — CNG (compressed natural gas) vehicles was part of that,” Townsell said. “We were already doing recycling, but she did it on Mondays, and she pushed to broaden it.”

He said Harrington pursued and achieved approval to use a fabric cover for the landfill instead of 6 inches of clay to cover the day’s collections. “We saved 6 inches of vertical space in the landfill every day,” he said.

Harrington had battled cancer for 15 years, starting with breast cancer at age 35, according to a 2012 interview in the River Valley & Ozark Edition. At that time, she said the cancer had spread to her trachea and spine. Still, she continued to work.

Bell said Lisa Mabry-Williams, human resources director for the city, is working on an ad for the job, which should be posted “within the next couple of weeks.”

“I anticipate we’ll have a lot of applicants; it is a great department, probably the best in the state. Our recycling department is second to none; it serves as a model for a lot of communities,” Bell said. “It is a big job. If you start thinking about it, it’s not just running a landfill. … There’s the recycling part of it, the reuse center.”

Townsell said it’s hard to gauge what kind of interest the position will garner.

“In some senses, it’s a very narrow field,” Townsell said. “There are only 22 working landfills in the state of Arkansas. The route aspect is another; the recycling aspect is another. Those skill sets are few and far between. It may be that we have to go beyond the borders of the state of Arkansas.”

Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.

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