The landfill here refuses waste from outside Howard County and wants to see your permit at the gate. An out-of-town crew may have nowhere to put your old roof.
Big Spring has a rule about your roofing debris that we have not found anywhere else in Texas, and it is the first thing any contractor working here needs to understand.
The Big Spring landfill will not accept waste that originated outside Big Spring or Howard County. To tip, the building permit for the job must be presented. And haulers based outside the city need a permit from the City Manager to operate. Taken together, that means a crew driving in from Midland or Lubbock cannot simply load your tear-off and dispose of it — not conveniently, and possibly not at all. Disposal runs $50.80 per ton and it is a real line item rather than an afterthought. When someone quotes you a Big Spring roof without having thought about where the shingles go, they have not priced the job.
Big Spring is also the oldest-code city we work in anywhere: it is still on the 2012 International Codes. Most of Texas is on 2021; Sugar Land moved to 2024. We should be straight about a limit in what we could establish: Big Spring's full amendment list and its climate design table sit on a hosting platform that blocked every retrieval route we tried, so we could not read them. We therefore do not publish a Big Spring design wind speed or claim to know which sections the city amended. We ask the building department instead. A contractor who states those details confidently has either called the city or invented them.
What we can state plainly: a permit is required for any re-roof at all — no square-footage threshold, no small-repair carve-out — and the fee is $50. And Big Spring does something unusual and helpfully clear on insurance: the city explicitly states that it does not need to be listed as the certificate holder. That is the opposite of Sherman, White Settlement and Pearland, all of which require exactly that. It is a small thing that trips up contractors moving between markets.
The housing here is the story, and it is a story about a base closing. Webb Air Force Base was reactivated in 1951 and closed in 1977. The consequence is visible in every housing statistic: 28.8% of Big Spring's current housing was built in the 1950s and a further 22.9% in the 1960s, 79.8% of the stock predates 1980, and in the most recent census estimate just six units, plus or minus thirteen, have been built since 2020.
That is close to a frozen housing stock. Practically every roof in this city is a third or fourth covering on a house built for a base that has been gone for nearly fifty years. Plank decking, accumulated fastener damage, ventilation from an era nobody designs to any more. It is careful work, and it is most of what we do here.
The storm season runs latest of anywhere we work: 49 distinct hail days in May and 32 in June, against only 24 in April. June outranking April is unusual even by West Texas standards. Big Spring also logs 22 non-thunderstorm high wind events against Dallas County's seven — elevated, though short of Lubbock — and only two dust storms, so the haboob story does not belong here.
What does belong here is ice. Howard County records the heaviest ice accretions of any city in this region, including a full inch in December 2013. That is a genuine scheduling constraint in winter and a reason we will not leave a tear-off dried in overnight when ice is forecast.
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View Roof Maintenance →The Big Spring landfill will not accept waste originating outside Big Spring or Howard County, requires the building permit to be presented at the gate, and charges $50.80 per ton. Haulers based outside the city need a City Manager permit to operate. A crew driving in from another market may find it has nowhere lawful to take your shingles. We solve disposal before we start, and it is inside the price.
Nearly 29% of Big Spring was built in the 1950s and another 23% in the 1960s, with 79.8% of the city predating 1980 and almost nothing built since 2020. These are third and fourth coverings on houses built for a base that closed in 1977 — plank decking, decades of accumulated fastener holes, and ventilation from a different era. We open the roof and photograph the deck before quoting the full job.
Big Spring's full code amendment list and its climate design table sit on a platform that blocked every retrieval route we tried, so we do not publish a Big Spring design wind speed and we do not claim to know which sections the city amended. We confirm with the building department per job. We would rather show you the edge of what we know than fill the gap with a neighbouring city's numbers.
Don't see your question? Call us at (469) 936-7663 — we're happy to talk it through.
Yes, for any re-roof — there is no square-footage threshold and no small-repair exemption. The fee is $50. That is one of the clearest permit positions of any city we work in, and it contrasts with Abilene, which only requires one above five squares, and Austin, which exempts shingle-for-shingle replacement entirely outside its wildland-urban interface.
To the Big Spring landfill, at $50.80 per ton, with the building permit presented at the gate — and this is where out-of-town crews run into trouble. The landfill will not accept waste that originated outside Big Spring or Howard County, and haulers based outside the city need a permit from the City Manager to operate here. If a contractor from another market has not worked out their disposal route before quoting, they have not finished pricing your job.
The 2012 International Codes, which is the oldest adoption of any city we work in — most of Texas is on 2021 and Sugar Land moved to 2024. We have to be honest about a gap here: Big Spring's full amendment list and its climate design table are hosted on a platform that blocked every retrieval route we tried, so we could not read them. We confirm the specifics with the building department rather than assuming they match Midland or Odessa.
We do not know, and we are not going to publish one. The city's climate design table was not retrievable for us. Midland and Odessa both use 115 mph, Abilene uses 105 — the spread across West Texas is real enough that guessing would be wrong as often as right. We ask the building official for your job. Treat any page quoting a confident Big Spring wind figure with appropriate scepticism.
No, and Big Spring says so explicitly, which is genuinely useful because it is the opposite of several nearby markets. Sherman, White Settlement and Pearland all require the city to be listed as certificate holder on the contractor's liability policy. Big Spring states plainly that it does not need to be. It is the sort of small procedural difference that delays a permit when a contractor assumes one city's rules apply in another.
Later than anywhere else we work. There are 49 distinct hail days in May and 32 in June, against only 24 in April. June outranking April is unusual even by West Texas standards, where May is generally the peak. If you inspect your roof in early spring here you are looking well before the season starts.
Partly. Howard County logs 22 non-thunderstorm high wind events over this period against Dallas County's seven, so the clear-day wind loading is genuinely elevated and it matters for fastening and edge detail. But dust is not a Big Spring story — two recorded dust storms against Lubbock County's nineteen. The haboob narrative belongs to Lubbock and the Panhandle, and we are not going to borrow it.
More than anywhere else in this region. Howard County records the heaviest ice accretions of any city we work in West Texas, including a full inch in December 2013. The code does not require ice barrier underlayment and we will not sell it as a code requirement. What it does change is scheduling — we will not leave a roof dried in overnight ahead of a forecast ice event, and we plan tear-off days around the forecast rather than around the calendar.
Webb Air Force Base. It was reactivated in 1951 and 1952 and closed in 1977, and the city's housing froze more or less at that point. Nearly 29% of current housing was built in the 1950s, another 23% in the 1960s, 79.8% predates 1980, and the most recent census estimate shows just six units built since 2020. Very little new construction has arrived in fifty years, which means practically every roof in this city is a replacement rather than a first covering.
Usually, and the calculation here is different from a DFW suburb, so we treat it that way. What decides it is the decking. A house on its fourth covering has a lot of fastener holes in the sheathing, and plank decking behaves differently from modern panel — sometimes it needs an overlay before shingles can be fastened correctly. We photograph what we find once the old roof is off and show you before anything goes back down. If a repair genuinely buys you several years rather than deferring the same conversation, we will tell you that.
Call us at (469) 936-7663, or request your free estimate online — most inspections are scheduled within 24–48 hours.
(469) 936-7663