At a work session Monday night, the City and Borough of Juneau Assembly worked for about an hour to answer the age-old question: What happens after you flush?<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a question that has troubled city officials for some time.<\/p>\n
Currently, the city ships its biosolids \u2014 the solid byproduct of the wastewater-treatment process \u2014 via barge to Seattle. The containers of sludgy waste are then loaded onto a train to Oregon, where they are dumped in a landfill. This has been the status quo ever since the incinerator that burned the biosolids locally crapped out, so to speak, five years ago. <\/p>\n
\u201cAt the end of the day it\u2019s a pretty tenuous thing that we do, and I don\u2019t think anybody in that chain really wants our business,\u201d Rorie Watt, director of public works and engineering, said at a Utility Advisory Board meeting in November. <\/p>\n
After wrestling with the issue for months, the members of the UAB forwarded a recommendation to the Assembly, which it heard in January. The recommendation gave the Assembly a choice: It could either buy a $16 million dryer that will turn the biosolids into a product to be used in Juneau, or it could outsource the problem to members of the private sector looking to construct a monofill. A monofill is a single-use landfill used only for biosolids.<\/p>\n
With a 6\u20131 vote, the Assembly decided to go with the dryer, which was what city staff recommended.<\/p>\n
The decision was not an easy one, and both solutions had benefits and drawbacks. The monofill \u2014 the brainchild of Spike Bicknell and Chris Gerondale working as Juneau Monofill Company \u2014 would come with no upfront cost, while the dryer came with a high initial cost. On the other hand, the dryer \u201cis very inexpensive to run,\u201d Watt told the Assembly, and it has a smaller carbon footprint.<\/p>\n
Most importantly, a dryer would be less expensive than monofilling in the long run, according to staff estimates. Twenty years from now, Watt estimated that the city will have saved a little more than $1 million dollars by choosing the dryer over the monofill. Juneau Monofill Company\u2019s estimates differed, showing the monofill coming out ahead in the 20-year-timeline, but the dryer still came on top looking ahead 25 and 30 years.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe longer the horizon, the worse monofilling and shipping look,\u201d Watt said. \u201cThe longer the horizon, the better the dryer is. This is because the dryer has a 20-year life, but once that 20 years is up, you will rehab it and run it for another 20 years.\u201d <\/p>\n
The monofill has a fairly restricted life span. JMC estimated that it could be used for up to 30 years, but it will inevitably reach its limit at which point the city would likely have to invest in a dryer or some other such technology. Bicknell, who spoke briefly toward the end of Monday\u2019s meeting acknowledged this.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur whole proposal, when we put this together, was to buy the CBJ some time to get in a better position,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
The dryer also allows the city to maintain greater control over what happens to our waste, which was a central part of the Assembly\u2019s discussion Monday. <\/p>\n
Assembly member Debbie White, the lone vote against the dryer, asked Watt several questions about why outsourcing to the private sector at the cost of letting go of local control is a bad thing. Watt responded using the landfill and garbage pickup, neither of which the city control, as examples. Watt said that most complaints he receives from the public are a result of these two processes.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have not had control of either of those things, and it has been continuously frustrating,\u201d Watt said.<\/p>\n
White and Assembly member Jerry Nankervis asked whether the city could write its contract with JMC in a way that could mitigate any future problems that come with relinquishing control. Watt was doubtful.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe could try to write everything that would be problematic into the contract in the future, but we don\u2019t have perfect vision,\u201d Watt responded.\u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s just my sense that, over time, we would wish that we had more control over what would happen in a monofill operation.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the end, the decision came down to economics. According to the city\u2019s Finance Director Bob Bartholomew, who answered several questions at Monday\u2019s meeting, the city has the debt capacity to handle the $16 million capital cost of the dryer. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe have about $40M of debt capacity, and I think that\u2019s too conservative,\u201d Bartholomew said, responding to Assembly member Maria Gladziszewski, who asked whether the city could afford the steep initial cost. \u201cWe have quite a bit of room for debt capacity.\u201d<\/p>\n
This, plus the long-term cost effectiveness of the dryer, ended up persuading several Assembly members, including Jerry Nankervis, who said he entered the meeting believing the monofill was the best option.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy numbers show the 30-year option go to the dryer, which goes against my belief that we should try to involve private businesses and that the government shouldn\u2019t try to do everything,\u201d Nankervis said. \u201cI came in thinking I was going to be in one place, and now I\u2019m in another. I\u2019m surprised myself, but I\u2019m here.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gerondale told the Empire Tuesday that he \u201chas no issues\u201d with the city after Monday night\u2019s decision, and he complimented the members of the UAB for putting together their recommendation. <\/p>\n
\u201cIn the long run maybe the dryer is the best idea, but maybe it would\u2019ve been a good idea to pause for five years and think about it, and I think the monofill would\u2019ve let that happen,\u201d Gerondale said, explaining that the state\u2019s current fiscal crisis will eventually impact the city, too. <\/p>\n
All told, he said that JMC spent \u201cin excess of $30,000\u201d putting together the monofill proposal. After accounting for wages, consulting work and boat and plane trips to various sites, developing such a proposal isn\u2019t cheap, and that\u2019s not accounting for the time that Bicknell spent away from other work while fleshing out this plan. Although the Assembly ultimately didn\u2019t side in JMC\u2019s favor, Watt said that the Bicknell and Gerondale did was \u201ca great economic service to the community.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI think they showed the best that a monofilling option would look like,\u201d Watt told the Empire Tuesday. \u201cThey ran that to ground. They did that far better than we ever could\u2019ve. I think if we hired somebody to try and figure that out, we would\u2019ve spent tens of thousands of dollars and gotten a lesser product.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At a work session Monday night, the City and Borough of Juneau Assembly worked for about an hour to answer the age-old question: What happens after you flush? It\u2019s a question that has troubled city officials for some time. Currently, the city ships its biosolids \u2014 the solid byproduct of the wastewater-treatment process \u2014 via […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":25126,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[75],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-25125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25125\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25125"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=25125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}