03/25/2009: "Two Dumps For San Juan Island?"

(Town Council meets with County Council)

The County Council held two work sessions Tuesday on transfer station issues, one with the Town Council (the owners of the current transfer station), and then one with Public Works.

At the joint Town-Council meeting, the question that has been in the background was finally raised by Councilman Bob Myhr when he point blank asked the Town Council if they will “completely -and I use the word completely- totally join in and eliminate all use of the Sutton Road site?”

Mayor Jones responded by stating “what you are really saying is what happens to your utility if half your waste goes somewhere else.” Myhr asked if there was a way to make sure the Town and the County could work together so there would not be two sites, one for the Town and one for the County.

Town Council member Carrie Brooks said “We are not confident that it is going to work the way that it could; we are hoping that it would.” Brooks then addressed the history of the Town-County relationship of the Sutton Road site, which the County leases from the Town, as one that “has not been really good. Were the landlord, and you have really been bad people to take the facility and let it deteriorate the way that it has…so were a little bit timid to say we put all our trust and confidence in the County.”

Brooks than addressed the multi-million dollar question of cost, stating “we don’t know what the cost is going to be, we don’t know if we can afford” sharing a new transfer station with the County.

Town Council member Chris Wolf told the county council “We have to do what’s best for our rate payers; if going with a county facility works out for our rate payers, then we have to do that.”

Carrie Lacher is a member of the town council and the County Solid Waste Advisory Committee (SWAC) and she agreed with Wolf, but said as a SWAC member she did not believe the Sutton Road site would meet the needs of the Town for the next 50 or 100 years.

Councilmember Liz Illg said it seemed to her there is a fundamental difference between how the Town and the Count have approached the planning for a new transfer station. Illg said the Town uses a financial model based on future costs to provide services, whereas the County approach “is sort of being more visionary, and say ‘What are the things you would like to have in the best possible solid waste world’.” There is, she said, a “clash between these two models.”

Illg explained that when “you guys ask us ‘What are you going to do’, we are falling back on our fiscal model.” Illig added “everyone siting at this table would love to have all of the great things that were set out as criteria for the transfer station, but we are weighted down by our fiscal model.”

County -and a former Town- Council member Howard Rosenfeld said “We haven’t addressed cost, we don’t know what this thing is going to cost.” He said if they looked at it the way the Town was doing it the County would ask “What are the fees going to be, and can we afford them, let’s see what there going to be before we decide” what to do in making a decision “especially if we already have a facility that can be made to work.”

Councilman Richard Fralick of Orcas island said “the transfer station on San Juan is starting to hit the radar on Orcas; finally…The reason for that, is the economic driver, because we realize if we have a very expensive facility, and try to have uniform tipping fees, it is going to have an impact on Orcas, and not just San Juan Island.”

With that the two councils left the room, but not before agreeing to work together to reach common ground for a new, or at least an improved, transfer station to meet both of their needs at a cost that is realistic.

Later in the day the Council met with representatives from Public Works in a give-and take- work session that kept up the theme of the necessity of knowing what the costs are going to be. PW Director Jon Shannon told the council PW can give them good numbers on cost once the Council tells PW where the transfer station will be located, and what services are to be provided.