City Staff Puts Forth Draft Feasibility Study on Compost Facility

Debate over a potential Byxbee Park compost facility heated up again Monday night when the City Council analyzed and debated a recently-completed draft feasibility study of the project.

Council members have been weighing the possible effects of a since April of last year.

City staff presented a draft feasibility study, started earlier this month, which sought to address council and public comments drawn from . The study provides scenarios based on different public and council members’ assumptions involving ownership, financing, grant funding, rent, carbon dioxide adders and export contingencies. New data on costs and greenhouse gases were also provided in the study.

In previous meetings, city staff discussed environmental effects of the plan and are now exploring the financial aspects.

“Up to this point, we’ve focused a lot on the environmental benefits of anaerobic digestion, that we produce enough green energy to power up fourteen hundred homes, reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 20,000 tons, compared to the current practices [and] that renewable energy would be available even if the grid goes down, like it did last February when there was the plane crash,” former Mayor and compost-facility advocate Peter Drekmeier said. “Tonight, the focus is a lot more on the economics.”

Using various scenarios and assumed values, Drekmeier explained what he considers to be the financial benefits of enacting the plan.

“[The cost of the] dry anaerobic digestion goes down after 20 years [when] the facilities [have] been paid off, whereas the [cost of] alternatives continue to go up,” Drekmeier said. “If we were to look at another 10 years, we would save a lot more money. The 20 years was chosen because that’s the financing for the facility. The facilities are going to last a lot longer than that. If you look at the incinerator, it’s been retrofitted once, it’ll be retrofitted again. It’ll last about 50 years.”

Former Council Member Edith Pearson, weighing in against the plan Monday night, argued, however, that the establishment of the facility will not provide any benefits to waste treatment.

“To build a 110 to 201 million dollar plant for less than 10 percent of the garbage does not make fiscal or environmental sense.”

agreed, adding that staff members recorded fabricated numbers in their data to distract council members and support their aim of building the digestion facility.  

“[Mayor Espinosa and members of the council have] been given a confusing mix of statistics," she said, "which began with data provided by some interested technology vendors, and then [it’s] massaged in-house with inflation rates bearing from zero percent on rent to five percent on the fictional carbon adder."

"Rather than providing [them] and the public with realistic estimates of the costs of the technology, staff and the consultant have provided you with figures manipulated to try to provide a ‘feasible option for anaerobic digestion,” she said.

Renzel added that the study lacks solutions to the environmental concerns raised over the plan.

“In addition to the rent and carbon adder manipulations, no costs have been included for any mitigations of building this industrial facility on parkland and removing all the trees that currently screen the sewage plant from the park,” Renzel said. “The study also does not take into account the 2.6 acres of deeper 50-foot landfill in the 10.1 acres subject to the initiative verses the relatively flatter nine acres used in the study. The 10.1 acres site would require removing 1.6 million cubic feet of old garbage onto the remainder of Byxbee Park and would add much more [expensive] costs in environmental impacts.”

While still addressing costs, Green Team and Board Member David Coale approached the debate with a broader, concise explanation.

“Lowest costs, lowest impact,” he said.