MOULTRIE, Ga. – Paying bills or receiving services from the Moultrie City Municipal building just got easier with the opening of the new drive-thru facility.

“We started planning for the drive-thru during the fourth quarter of last year,” City Manager Pete Dillard said in a phone interview Monday.

The building already had an established drive-thru. The plans were to renovate it and expand it with an additional lane, according to Greg Monfort, the director of the Moultrie Engineering Department.

The expansion of the drive-thru was not funded by local taxpayers but by the American Recovery Act, Monfort said. 

He said during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Rex Reynolds and his team from the city Engineering Department had to create a makeshift “walk up to pay your bill window,” as a way to social distance and to keep a large group of customers from coming inside. 

 “We started talking about a drive-thru about this time last year,” Montfort said in an interview Tuesday.

Gideon Constructors, a general contractor out of Valdosta, was in charge of the construction and has been subbing out different parts of the project.

“Rex and his crew have really done a lot in the background,” Monfort said

To establish the new drive-thru, they had to demolish the existing asphalt and replace it with concrete.

“When you have asphalt in places like that, and you come up and you stop and you twist your tires like in tight areas most cars leak and drip oil, and that oil eats up the asphalt,” Montfort said. “So we put back a concrete surface, and it’ll be there indefinitely.”

Reynolds said that no big trucks or trailers can drive in the new lanes.

“Some of the jacked-up trucks around here probably wouldn’t make it but some of them would,” Reynolds said in an interview Tuesday. “That’s why we went as high as we could.” 

The clearance pole for the drive-through is 9 feet tall and has a swinging pole. If your vehicle taps the pole as you attempt to drive in the lane, then the vehicle is too tall for it.

Montfort said that the clearance pole is above average compared to surrounding banks.

Reynolds said they widened the lanes to 11 feet wide instead of opting for 9-foot dimensions like most banks. 

The last part of the drive-thru that needs to be completed is the ceiling.

Montfort said it could take approximately one to two weeks before the ceiling is finished.

Once Monfort and Reynold’s team meet the subcontractor and talk about the plans for the ceiling, they can then purchase the materials and complete the drive-thru.

The drive-thru is currently open and ready for customers.