This article appeared in the Strib. No mention of community/environmental concerns.
Trash costs drive Ramsey, Washington counties to consider Newport plant buyout
But county officials admit that the alternative they seem to be heading for — a $26 million public buyout of a privately run trash processing plant they now pay to use in Newport — carries risks as well.
“It’s not an easy decision,” said Washington commissioner Ted Bearth. “The government shouldn’t do all things.”
Judy Hunter, senior program manager for Washington County’s Department of Public Health & Environment, said the discovery that it should cost the public $61 a ton to handle trash, when a private firm collects $86 per ton, “was a real eye opener for us. We believe the gap is the profit margin.”
A decision on a public buyout is coming Thursday from a board consisting of Ramsey and Washington commissioners. Each County Board would then act in June, after studying the question since 2013.
The move to a buyout has been percolating for years.
In 2012, Washington County’s decision to pay the private firm $2.3 million a year to help ensure haulers use the Newport plant, led then-Commissioner Autumn Lehrke to lament:
“When they’re asking for a subsidy like this, I think we have every right to see their books. I just have a hard time taking hard-earned tax dollars and subsidizing their profit.”
Chris Gondeck, chief operations officer for Resource Recovery Technologies, the firm that owns the plant, said:
“All along we’ve told [county officials] that we can’t comment on our financial statements, not even to say ‘you’re close’ or ‘not close.’ So, ‘no comment’ there. But we’ve told the counties to make the assumption that we’re economically viable and focus on what the counties could do as far as savings.”
‘Great experiment’
The plant opened in 1987, billed at the time as the “great garbage experiment,” a way of making energy out of trash rather than just dumping it into the ground. The plant processes raw waste into a substance that can be burned for electricity.
But Gondeck said the counties were elevating the cost of the business by leaving the plant in private hands. Without public ownership, the counties couldn’t legally require haulers to use the Newport plant.
That meant haulers needed to be lured into using it financially, given the cheaper option of a Wisconsin landfill. And it meant some tonnage still ended up in Wisconsin.
To compensate, the plant owner needed to pull in trash from Dakota and more distant counties. “And it’s more expensive to bring it in from other counties — to facilitate that with the haulers,” he said.
Once you can require all the garbage to go to Newport, Hunter told Washington commissioners, “the county subsidy declines to zero; the tipping fees pay the full cost of processing.”
The timing of the buyout talks stems from the expiration of the current contract — at the end of 2015 — between the counties and the private firm. The counties could stick with the public-private combination, but they don’t seem inclined to do so.
“The advantages of public ownership appear to stack up quite well,” said Zack Hansen, Environmental Health Director for the St. Paul-Ramsey Department of Public Health. It’s more cost effective, he said, and it allows the counties to better plan for things like an expansion of recycling. “How can we design a system that maximizes value,” for instance by turning organic waste into fuels such as biogas or ethanol, Hansen said. “It’s about improving the system overall.”
Level field
Independent local haulers mostly support the change, Hunter said, because it levels the playing field among competitors: No one saves money by shipping refuse across state borders more cheaply.
Newport was nervous about losing tax revenue from a private entity, officials said, but the county will make sure the city doesn’t lose out by making what’s known as a payment in lieu of taxes, commissioners were told at a recent meeting.
Public ownership adds another form of stability, said Washington County Commissioner Fran Miron.
“A tremendously aspect of this whole issue,” he said, “is that if the property were to be sold for some other purpose, permitting a facility like this anywhere else is probably nearly impossible to achieve.”
So we tried to contact the reporter, who ignored us.
May 25, 2015
Hello Mr. Peterson:
I’d like to chat with you about this. (Also left you a phone message.) There are lots of concerns and points of view not in the story as it appeared this morning.
Best,
Alan Muller
Energy & Environmental Consulting
Red Wing, MN
Port Penn, DE
302.299.6783
alan@greendel.org
So we sent a Letter to the Editor, which was also ignored/not printed:
Date: Tue, 26 May 2015 17:27:36 -0500
To: opinion@startribune.com,
From: Alan Muller <alan@greendel.org>
Subject: Letter to the Editor–garbage
Cc: sbrandt@startribune.com, jill.burcum@startribune.com, sgillespie@startribune.com, michael.klingensmith@startribune.com, josephine.marcotty@startribune.com, ericw@startribune.com, dtice@startribune.com, maria.reeve@startribune.com, raolson@startribune.com
Your story (May 23rd) on the proposal that Ramsey and Washington counties buy the RRT garbage grinder in Newport for over $26 million doesn’t give the whole story.
First, the present system is extraordinarily expensive. Residents and businesses in the two counties are paying combined state and county waste taxes (surcharges) as high as 70 percent.
Much of the garbage is ground up in Newport and sent for incineration in Red Wing and Mankato, in converted 1940s coal burners with lax and long-expired permits. The energy output is small and the harmful are emissions high. At the least, this is a Bad Neighbor Policy, and negligent on the part of the counties and the Pollution Control Agency. The multiple “processing” steps at multiple locations add greatly to the cost.
If the counties buy the garbage grinder, they will be able to force waste haulers to use it, eliminating competition with other private-sector facilities. Monopoly rarely reduces costs and it would be naive to expect so here.
The counties have not seriously looked at waste prevention, greatly enhanced recycling, and the other “Zero Waste” techniques increasingly adopted by enlightened communities around the world. Nor have they seriously involved the public in decision making about waste management. Buying the grinder would tend to commit the counties to the status quo, or worse, for decades to come.
So, the expected vote on May 28 to buy the Newport garbage grinder would be premature and unwise. The counties have an option to buy the facility at a set price until the end of 2015. They should postpone the decision, and begin involving the public in a serious look at cheaper, healthier, and more environmentally sound alternatives.
Alan Muller
Neighbors Against the Burner
Red Wing
So we sent another, shorter, LTE, on August 25th. This was also ignored/not printed.
To: Opinion@startribune.com
1110 West Avenue
Red Wing
302.299.6783
Then, after the commissioners, voted, as a joint powers board, to buy the garbage grinder, this story appeared:
A board consisting of commissioners from both counties agreed almost unanimously Thursday to recommend spending $24.4 million to buy the plant, if a series of conditions is met by December.
That’s less than the $26.4 million, plus the current owner’s capital expenses, that an arbitrator had ruled was fair. Commissioners complained that the price seemed high for a facility with no other obvious buyer, and had pushed back the purchase to allow time for further talks.
The plant processes garbage from the two counties and from some outside customers to the point where it can be burned elsewhere to produce electricity.
The lone dissenting commissioner, Gary Kriesel of Washington County, likened the purchase to “buying a Blockbuster store,” in the sense that better technologies should eventually come along to replace it.
A group called Neighbors Against the Burner turned up with protest signs, and one member stood near the commissioners for much of the meeting in a gas mask, holding up a succession of written messages complaining of pollution and of a refusal to allow public testimony at Thursday’s session in St. Paul.
Most members of the Resource Recovery Project Board argued, however, that for the moment, a purchase is the way to go.
“I, too, would like to have the tools to not just ‘grind and burn,’ ” said Ramsey County Commissioner Victoria Reinhardt. “But the reason I changed my mind, from where I started a year and a half ago, is that I believe we cannot reach that goal without gaining control of the waste, so we can say ‘This is what we do, we compost, we [move to other options].’ Once we buy the plant we can choose to do different things with that.”
Washington County Commissioner Karla Bigham said she had misgivings: “None of us want to be in the garbage processing business.”
But once the current owner, Resource Recovery Technologies, signaled a desire to sell, she said, the risks became too serious. They included, she said, waste ending up in landfills, and a loss of scores of jobs. Bigham represents the city of Newport.
One advantage offered by public ownership, commissioners repeated Thursday, is the ability legally to direct waste to the Newport plant instead of allowing a portion to be landfilled out of state. That cannot be done on behalf of a private party. Commissioners also aim to phase out subsidies now needed to induce haulers to use the plant.
Ramsey County, the larger of the two counties, would be responsible for more of the purchase price than Washington: nearly $18 million vs. Washington’s $6.6 million. Washington hopes to avoid debt financing by drawing from a solid waste reserve, commissioners were told, while Ramsey would be expected to borrow by issuing bonds.
The deal is expected to be submitted to both boards for ratification on Sept. 22.
The remaining sticking points have to do with issues such as long-term union contracts. Legally, the counties can’t subscribe to those in the way that the private owner, Resource Recovery Technologies, has done.
Is this journalism, or is this stenography? How much was the Strib’s coverage influenced by the Burner Board’s $120,000 invest in “strategic communications” assistance?
People who might know but do not return our calls:
Scott Gillespie, Editor, Editorial Pages 612.673.4516 scott.gillespie@startribune.com
Rene Sanchez, Editor & Senior VP 612.673.1731 rene.sanchez@startribune.com
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