The city manager has apparently selected a vendor to remove Shingle Mountain, pending City Council approval. Councilman Tennell Atkins, who represents the southern Dallas district that houses the 70,000-ton pile of shingles, sent an email on Tuesday afternoon announcing that City Manager T.C. Broadnax is “recommending the lowest responsible bidder.” At $450,000, it’s about a quarter what the Council thought it would cost to haul away. It is typical for the lowest responsible bid to get the nod from the city manager, per a spokesperson.

The pile of shingles has been there for about three years, blowing tiny shards of fiberglass around Marsha Jackson’s adjacent property.

“They have told us so many times that it will be removed,” says Jackson, who says she now suffers respiratory ailments and rashes because of the particles that get blown around her home. “I try to be excited, but I can’t see it.”

Atkins says the City Council will vote on the matter on October 13. There is no timeline yet for removing the dump, which has been there since January of 2018. Atkins had said it would cost $2.1 million to haul it away. It’s not clear why this bid is so comparatively low; it might bypass the nearby city dump and its tipping fees altogether. We’ve asked the city for more information. Previously, the city had wanted the landowner to pitch in to help with removal.

Jackson in July sued the city to remove the illegal shingle dump and rezone the land so that other industrial uses can’t go in next to her home or nearby the other 22 that are in her neighborhood. City Council and staff have been careful in what they’ve said regarding the matter since the lawsuit was filed. Jackson says she hasn’t been contacted by any city officials and was unaware of the bid until former Dallas Morning News columnist Robert Wilonsky tagged her in a Facebook post.

In unveiling the budget in mid-August, Broadnax said there was no line item for its removal, but “I know we are committed to resolving that issue both in court and, once that is completed, to determine how in fact we go about cleaning up that particular nuisance in our community.”