The city could be burying $446,790 in the Glen Lily landfill soon.

At its meeting Tuesday night, the Bowling Green City Commission will hear a plan to make major improvements to the city’s inactive Glen Lily landfill.

Bowling Green company Holland Inc. had a low bid of $446,790 to install six acres of synthetic liner at the site to address some liquid collection issues.

While the city will dole out the initial cash, the money is actually coming from the Kentucky Division of Waste Management, which is giving the city $450,000 through the Kentucky Pride Historic Landfill program.

The Glen Lily site stopped receiving trash in 1981, and regulations were later set up by the division for monitoring leachate – the liquid produced by a landfill. The leachate collection system was originally surface ponds, then upgraded to concrete tanks. However, when the upgrade happened, the collection pipes that ran on the side of the landfill weren’t covered with any sort of liner, according to Matt Powell, of Bowling Green Public Works Department’s stormwater management division.

“As a result, stormwater still mixes with what little bit of water comes out from the actual landfill. We think we have a tiny amount of leachate, (but) once stormwater mixes in, the entire mixture is leachate,” Powell said.

This is filling up the tanks with the waste water, which have to be pumped out frequently, according to Powell.

The hope is the new system will cut down on the amount of leachate produced, thus cutting down on how often the city must pay to pump the tanks and treat the water.

“What this project is going to do is add enough liner on either side of what’s existing to cover up those collection lines and cut down on the amount of leachate we have,” Powell said. “We’re going to be looking at pumping our tanks very, very infrequently because we’ll have enough storage to keep whatever we generate for years at a time.”

If the project gets the city commission’s approval, construction should start as early as next Monday.

Glen Lily is one of two inactive landfills the city is responsible for maintaining. The other is in Butler County, and both are vestiges of when the city ran its own garbage collection.

Despite being inactive for some time, the state doesn’t have the manpower to actually give the go ahead for an official closure, so the city must continue to monitor the two landfills. The city commission recently approved spending about $175,000 to make improvements to the Butler County landfill’s leachate collection system as well.

Also before the city commission Tuesday night is a request to install lighting at the Hobson Grove baseball fields. The $158,500 bid by Barton Electric, of Trenton, Ill., would replace the 38-year-old lighting currently used at the fields. The price the new lights would come with a 25-year warranty and reduce energy consumption by 46 percent.