2018 Public Utilities Board meeting to order. We have a qu
orum and it's six
o'clock. First items we have are going to be work session
items so we'll start
off with work session item A which is receive a report,
hold a discussion and
give staff direction regarding a review of the solid waste
department's landfill
and collection operations by Blue Ridge Services Inc. Good
evening members of the
board my name is Ethan Cox I'm the director of solid waste
for the city of
Denton. It's my pleasure to bring this item to you tonight.
We have Blue Ridge
Services here with us. I'll give them a bit of an
introduction in just a moment
but I want to give you a little bit of background on this
item before we get
started. So as most of you are aware over the last 13 to 14
months we've
basically done what we call kind of a series of diagnostic
checks on a number
of programs and the general health of the solid waste
department. A number of
those items like landfill mining, compressed natural gas
fueling, a lot of
that's been brought to the board and the council already.
As we've kind of gone
through these last few months we wanted to bring in some
outside assistance to
help us kind of cover the gamut of the remaining operations
that we have out
there. In addition we also felt it's necessary to kind of
assess our
organizational structure in our staffing for some of our
more critical
services and so we contract with Blue Ridge Services to
kind of help us along
in that manner. The purpose of this was just to do that is
to take a look at our
operations and kind of compare us to industry standard. It
doesn't mean that
industry standards right and we're incorrect it just simply
means where do
we fall in terms of other solid waste operations and so the
report that you
have in front of you tonight is fairly dense. You also will
be provided a copy
of the full report which is about a hundred pages. The way
that Blue Ridge is
going to go through this is by operations. Once they get
done with their
side of the presentation I'll return to the podium. These
are a little bit
different than some of the other presentations that you
receive. There's
both programs being evaluated there's also operational
suggestions. So when I
return to the podium I'll kind of break out management's
response number one to
the programs give you an idea of what to expect next and
also give you an idea of
where we stand with a lot of the operational
recommendations in the
report. So with that I'm going to go ahead introduce our
speakers tonight.
First up is Neil Bolton. He's the president of Blue Ridge
Services. More
than 40 years of experience in solid waste industry. I
visited hundreds of
landfills seeing quite a bit of the types of operations
that we run in his
day. In addition he's also the author of several
operational and safety handbooks.
We have several on site at our operation and most folks in
the solid waste
industry are very familiar with the training. His product
speaks for itself.
Instructor 200 plus training classes across the US and
abroad. Also with
us this evening is Ron Proto. He got 50 plus years
experience in solid waste
industry really focused on the collection side of the house
. He's
currently the president of the Ron Proto consulting group
as an engineering
manager and also runs acts as a group manager in some solid
waste operations in
San Francisco. So it's my distinct pleasure to welcome him
to the podium
and I'll turn it over to Neil.
Thank you. So my name is Neil Bolton. As Ethan said I've
been in the waste
business a long time. I've probably been to something north
of 500 landfills and
many hundred other types of waste facilities. So what we're
going to talk
about here today is it's kind of the results of an
operational assessment or
review kind of a boots-on-the-ground look at the facility
where we evaluate a
lot of your data but also just observe your operations. Ron
and I and another
person from our company, Kasem, we spent four days total on
site so we were all
there for about a week observing your operations,
collections, landfill, the
whole process and that's what we're going to be talking
about today to just kind
of give you an overview of where we are.
So we started off the way we normally do just submitting
questionnaires and
gathering a lot of data. You guys have a lot of information
that included the
collections and the landfill operations. We also did what
we normally do is the
operations and safety review. So as a consulting company we
're the guys who
kind of fit in between. We'll come in behind the time when
a facility is
designed or operated and look at how it's being operated.
So more the
practical aspect of that. So late March the three of us
were here and see if I
can get this to roll the right way. The three areas that we
looked at and that
we're going to talk about tonight are the landfill
collections and then sort
of the solid waste system in general in terms of the
overall process. So we're
going to start by talking about the landfill. The landfill
tonnage has
increased continually. This follows kind of the same
pattern that we see in many
other areas where the waste generation continues to
increase. We see this in
areas where there's a lot of growth, a lot of development
and we also find that
along with that same pattern recycling may be increasing as
well in some areas.
The department has instituted a lot of ancillary services
so we're not just
collecting in the landfill but there are a lot of other
operations that are sort
of integrated into that and we're going to talk about some
of those tonight in
terms of some that make sense and some that actually in our
opinion don't make
sense. So there's been a lot of growth and as tonnage
increases that generally
means revenue increases and when you look at the waste
industry in general as
a whole nationally there are lots of opportunities to do
other things with
waste besides just landfill and so your operation has has
done some of those
things and in some cases you know we found some ineffic
iencies with how those
are working. So part of the process is being able to plan
ahead and we're going
to talk about some planning recommendations that we have in
regard
to the landfill itself. There are three key areas one is
what we call a soil
management plan but that's really a strategic long-term
development plan. I
can give you an example for those of you that are familiar
with the site or have
been to the landfill or seen photos of the landfill. What
we're talking about
here is being able to strategically as though we were
playing chess with all
those pieces out there determine when we're going to reach
certain areas. So
you have a new line that you've just constructed there's a
big pile of soil
that came from that excavation and the question of where
that soil is and where
we put asphalt and concrete rubble and where we put other
materials is very
important because we see regularly facilities especially
those that are
growing fast and doing a lot of development all at once end
up putting
some materials in maybe less than the perfect strategic
location to the point
where sometimes have to be moved twice and so there are
some planning goals
that we think we could put into place there that make that
more efficient so
that you know strategically when you're going to fill a
certain area and how
much soil you will need for that area and how much concrete
or asphalt rubble
you might need for the access roads and the tipping pads to
service that area
and then what comes next when do we get to the next point
and having those
details would be very important. We'll talk a minute in a
minute just about how
airspace is currently being utilized at the site and we're
not as efficient as
we could be we could do a better job we could we could
improve our operations to
be able to consume less airspace by being more strategic
about how we fill
and how we compact trash and how we cover the trash and
that sort of ties
into all of this. The next recommendation in terms of a
plan is for an annual fill
sequence plan so one of the things that happens is when we
asked some of the
folks on the ground where are you going to be filling next
week or next month or
next wet season we didn't get consistent answers and what
that tells us is we
really don't know where we're going to go next we're just
kind of filling the
next active available place without any pre-planning so let
me give you an
example of how that would work. If we knew that during the
next wet season or
12 months from now during the whenever we have to be
someplace where we can
travel and have access during a wet period if we knew where
that was going to
be we could strategically build the base for that out of
waste get it covered and
then when asphalt and concrete rubble comes into the site
we could direct
customers to go to that location and dump it so that it's
where we're going
to need it. Right now we're dumping it in a central
location we're processing it
we're hauling up to the top of the hill and then we're
distributing from there
and so we handle that material multiple times at a fairly
high cost and there
are just more efficient ways of doing that but that
requires that we plan ahead
again to know where we're going to be next. This is a this
is common concept
for anybody in the construction business not just moving
trash or moving soil but
if you're building a building where do you put materials so
that during the
right place at the right time. The last part excuse me part
of a very small piece
of this is just having those wet weather tipping pads those
areas where we can
unload during the wet season set ahead of time. When we
were there we were
coming off the back end of a few days of rain and we were
pulling trucks in and
having some issues with that and so those are things that
we can we can
solve through better planning and just being more strategic
about how we move
those chess pieces around on site. So this just gives a
little more detail on
that I'm going to skip through this stuff. We get a lot of
rubble a lot of
concrete and asphalt rubble comes into the site and we go
through a number of
processes we stockpile it and we screen it and we move it
and we crush it and
we do a number of different things where we have an outside
contractor come in
and crush it. We do a number of different things and in the
end we come up with a
fairly in the construction industry if you were in the road
business you'd say
hey that's a nice material for me to use for my roads but
we're in the landfill
business and so we don't necessarily need to have that fine
material that fine
gravel for creating roads because it doesn't last nearly as
long as some of
the concrete and asphalt rubble that comes in if we could
just use it in bulk.
So if we can use chunks of asphalt and concrete that are
this size you would
never put this on a residential road or on your driveway
but at a landfill where
we're building on trash and so the base of what we're
building on is pretty soft
and we also have trucks and heavy equipment that are
driving up those
roads and into the dirt and into the mud and then back on
the road and very
quickly as we saw during our time there the road becomes
pretty well covered with
mud so we're spending a lot of money to process and touch
that concrete and
asphalt rubble multiple times to get it to a product that's
not the ideal product.
It would be better for us to use it almost as it comes in
aside from very
large pieces of curb and gutter and concrete with rebar in
it and the more
we can use that material just as is the less handling costs
we have and actually
the more durable our roads would be. And so some processed
material could be
beneficial in terms of covering roads and capping, topping
off roads that are
getting more traffic just vehicle traffic but in terms of a
landfill
operation that doesn't that doesn't make sense for us. On
top of it we're not
making any money with this with this rubble gravel
processing operation where
we crush rubble and create a product from it. Partly
because it's so expensive
to do that. Partly because we're taking it in at a rate
that may be a bit low
and we're selling at a rate that's also low and doesn't
cover our costs and
we're frankly taking in way more material than we need to
have. So what
normally happens at most facilities is that we'll identify
again through this
good pre-planning process how much of that material, how
much rubble concrete
and asphalt and maybe some processed gravel that we're
going to need and we
take in that amount. Here's here's what happens at other
landfills not all but
many other landfills. They'll identify how much of that
material they need and
once they've received that amount of material the gate rate
increases because
now it's not something that we are reusing to some benefit
it's not a
beneficial reuse material it's actually coming into our
site we don't need it we
don't maybe want it and we're losing money in processing it
. So at some point
we don't need to take in as much as we're taking in. If you
've been to the
site recently when we were there the end of March there's
quite a large pile of
unprocessed concrete and asphalt rubble and there's quite a
large pile of
processed material and frankly it's just more than we need
to have and so there
may be some benefits to being able to adjust the rates and
close the valve on
that material so to speak because we are losing some money
in that process. We
also have a building material recovery facility known as
the BMR and the BMR is
a recycling facility where vehicles come in cell fall
vehicles they dump their
trash on a concrete pad and then that material gets
processed. Some metal gets
pulled out some materials get extracted from that most of
that material then
goes through the process where it's shredded or ground up
at that facility
then it grows across a pick line an outside pick line it's
basically a
conveyor belt where people could stand there and pull recy
clables out of it's a
fairly common recycling process it's very labor-intensive.
When we were there
there was a lot of material passing through the system it
was all being
processed and ground up and what we found was that the
recycling benefit was
minimal 10% or less very very minimal amount of recycling
going on there to
the point that we actually observed one of the large excav
ators it has a grapple
on it called an orange peel grapple and it would it was we
watched it pick up a
piece of pipe that was about six feet long just a piece of
plumbing pipe pick
it up and drop it and reach down and pick it up again and
finally move it
that's a lot of equipment for a very minimal amount of
recycling and one of
the understandings that we had in reading through one of
the proformas
and some of the background on that BMR site was that by
processing the trash by
shredding it and grinding it up before we haul it to the
landfill and landfill
it and bury it and compact it that we would get a lot
better compaction rate
that is simply just not true in fact the compaction rate
that we're achieving is
below industry standard even facilities that that don't pre
-process that so
we're bringing waste material in we're dumping it we're
pushing it in a pile
we're picking it up and sorting through it we're putting it
in a shredder we're
running it through the shredder across a conveyor into a
truck and we're hauling
it to the landfill to process it and we're doing all of
that work and we're
getting less result than if we just sent that mature
directly to the landfill and
compacted it properly and part of the reason for that is
that the compactors
and I'll get to that in a minute the compactors then the
steel-wheeled
landfill compactors are not being used effectively and that
's not a criticism
on the operators at all it's just that the space allowed in
our work pattern is
not adequate I'll get to that in just a minute so the the
BMR is also similarly
losing money and we see no way that it's going to make
money with the current
process that it has so there is a small amount of diversion
that is happening
there but the sheer amount of equipment and effort and the
number of times we
touch that material is problematic for it's just costing us
more than it needs
to cost so just as a kind of set the tone for where we're
going to be going
from here on a very basic level a landfill can receive
waste and push it
and pack it and cover it that's a basic landfill operation
but you can also do
a lot of diversion activities you can divert concrete and
asphalt rubble and
you can push it in a pile and you can dump it through it gr
isly and you can
grind it and you can screen it and you can make a product
and you can move it
around you can do those things in the same way you can find
recyclable
commodities like what's coming out to BMR basically trash
and you can process
that with a lot of equipment and just because you can do
that doesn't mean that
economically or practically you should do that we see this
same thing I was at
a site a landfill in Colorado last week they have a very
extensive composting
operation and anything organic can be composted and it
looks great on the
front end and when you go to the back of the landfill they
have piles and piles
and piles of compost that can't be marketed because people
don't want
compost from the landfill for whatever reason in that
region they don't want it
so just because you can do something doesn't mean that you
should or that it's
gonna make economic sense so we think that the concrete and
asphalt rubble
operation and the BMR should be discontinued or at least
drastically
modified to the point where they are more functional and
more cost-effective
and you said there's only 10% that was truly recyclable in
all the BMR I
believe that's correct and I think Ethan ran a separate
comparison and verified
that that's in the ballpark yeah so 10% is 10% that's not
bad but
the cost there was a significant cost to that and that's a
question we have to
look at is how do we how do we function does that we will
not lose airspace
it's not like we're putting a material in there that could
have been used
somewhere else rather than going into the ground if you
compact and process
the waste properly you will actually consume less airspace
than you
currently are consuming and I'll get to that in just a
minute but our airspace
consumption rates are not are not good they don't they don
't match industry
typical standard and again not any reflection on the
operators or the staff
it's primarily just a process it would be if we all went
into that back room to
one tiny table and all tried to make tuna sandwiches at the
same time we
could all work hard and have the best of intentions but if
there's not enough
space for us to be efficient we just couldn't do it that's
what's happening
there question on the on the BMR rubble so that that
material who's bringing
that in is that a commercial operations that are bringing
that in it's coming in
from local contractors is my understanding yes so for the
building
materials recovery operation it's a mix of commercial
entities businesses
sometimes small businesses sometimes large and you will see
you know citizens
come in there single-haul trailers and dump so BMR is much
more of a mix I
think the rubble processing it is by a large large
contractors that are doing
either state road projects local road projects things like
that and so I think
looking at those two separately building materials recovery
we will be accepting
that waste one way or the other when it comes to concrete
or rubble we don't
necessarily need to accept that material on site kind of
the adage that I've used
with staff as we divert a hundred percent of the materials
that we don't
accept and so I think those two things kind of warrant a
different evaluation
if that makes sense I know the details would have to be
worked out but like if
we let's say we say okay we're gonna start raising the gate
rate or just not
take any more in for a while so you know how's that
communicated them and I don't
know are these is this is it is this a regional type deal
that's coming in or
there are other landfills that don't accept this that we
are for some reason
I don't want to steal Neal's airtime but I will comment on
that real quick is
and I'll have some of this in the presentation when I get
back up on the I
think from a concrete standpoint there are many other
concrete and rubble
processors out there several others that have approached us
in the past is you
know we provide this service we actually contract out our
grinding and processing
we don't do all that ourselves and so I think when it comes
to the rebel is
there are other options out there we're not the only show
in town there's
probably several in this region I think when it comes to
building materials
recovery the way I would look at that is that's waste that
we're going to be
processing and so if we can divert some of that material it
's definitely to our
benefit but I think it's like Neal said is what is it what
is the cost we don't
want to overdo it with big pieces of heavy equipment and
huge picking lines we
want to try to kind of right size that if that makes sense
and so I hope that
answers the question and I do see those as two separate
waste streams you can
get rid of the concrete that's really maybe not even our
role or should have
been but the building materials that that's a solid waste
that's it you're
either gonna be burying the building materials it's gonna
come in one way or
the other exactly right it's what I would call demo thank
you so how much is
the city of it and put in for all the streets are repairing
no I'm just kidding
you can answer later we were also doing a process that we
refer to as enhanced
leachate recirculation program where leachate is pumped le
achate is a liquid
that comes out of the landfill it's pumped back into the
top of the landfill
we're reinjecting that into the landfill and the primary
two reasons that
landfills do that one is to get rid of the leachate if you
have a lot of leachate
and that's a viable option for that that generates a lot of
settlement so it will
help the landfill to settle because now you're wetting the
waste and it will
decompose more rapidly and it also softens the cellulose
fibers take a
piece of paper and wad it up in your hand now get that
paper wet and see how
much smaller you can compact it so recirculating leachate
will help us in
some ways it helps the landfill in some ways it also
drastically increases the
rate of gas production within the landfill so within the
landfill and part
of the decomposition process waste decomposes a cubic foot
of waste from
your landfill would weigh about a hundred pounds and if we
watch that
fully decompose it would create about 600 cubic feet of
landfill gas so one of
the primary reasons that we research at leachate is to make
more gas there's a
problem with that currently the city doesn't control the
gas control system
at the landfill that's done by a private contractor and so
they are not required
the private contracts not required to put in landfill gas
wells where needed
to control landfill gas so we don't have landfill gas
migration from our landfill
they are strictly focused on maximizing gas recovery so
with their operation they
want good clean gas they want to put wells in where they
get lots of good
clean gas but if there is an issue where we have some
migration or we have some
issue with gas being produced in an area of the landfill
that we want to be
controlled we don't have the mechanism to require them to
do that that's
something that will be coming up at some point I believe
that contract renews at
some point and that's something that we would recommend
that the city take more
of an authority position in that to be able to put gas
wells in where you need
to have those so we also suggest that the ELR system be
discontinued for the
time being and at some point when you need to have more gas
when you have a
mechanism to control excess gas to go ahead and resume that
we also looked at the heavy equipment to landfill and a
couple of things that we
found that are pretty typical the kamatsu dozer you have
one big dozer d-155
that's a d8 size bulldozer that machine is working more
hours than it needs to
work and partly it's because of the process of being
constrained in a very
small work area and granted we were there when the landfill
was up on top of
the hill and you were getting close to moving into the new
liner at some point
but the hours of the machine bear bear out the fact that it
's being used too
many hours and the reason that is is because we don't have
enough space so
we're going to be making some recommendations I'll show you
here in
just a minute what that's going to look like we're
recommending that the tipping
face be broadened and widened so there's more room for
trucks to dump because
here's what happens in a very small space the bulldozer has
to be on call
because when the truck dumps and pulls out he has to push
that load to get
ready for the very next truck because we only have a few
slots for trucks to dump
that's not only inefficient because he spends a lot of time
at the starting
gate waiting for that next push it's also unsafe because he
's having to get
in between trucks and close to trucks and the fatalities
that we have at
landfills almost always occur at that location for that
reason we're just too
constrained and too crowded so we're making some
recommendations that we
widen that face out I'll show you what that looks like in a
minute but in the
process it will decrease the dozers hours by getting him
into more efficient
situation where he can actually push in a productive manner
and then park the
dozer and get on the water truck or go do something else
and a bit later come
back and do the same thing again we think we can cut his
hours by about 50%
you also have a couple of cat 826 compactors those are
caterpillars
medium-sized compactors compactors have a certain optimum
production rate if they
try to handle too much waste they don't compact well and
you lose airspace if
you overuse those compactors you spend more money on fuel
and machine wear and
tear then you gain an airspace so there's kind of a sweet
spot in there
with these machines they would have to increase their
annual work hours their
combined work hours from about 4300 hours to somewhere
around 5600 hours per
year that's a very very full-time process and it's because
those machines
aren't quite big enough for the inbound tonnage that you
have so we're making a
recommendation that at an appropriate time budget dependent
that you replace
those machines with the next size of caterpillars largest
or another vendor
another manufacturer of a comparably sized large compactor
which would do a
better job of compacting trash and not have to work as many
hours you just be
much more efficient because the production rate of a large
machine is
just higher than it is for a medium-sized machine like
someone one that
you have you also have a small dozer out there which is
ideal for trimming and
covering and we don't have any issue with you think we
think that's great we
should continue to to have and use that small bulldozer and
we're also using
three articulated haul trucks to haul soil and we haul some
rubble with them
and we do different things with those those those machines
are excessive in
terms of the number of machines we have if we utilize a
more effective means of
covering the trash an alternative daily cover and we'll
talk about tarps here in
just a minute that system would allow us to vastly decrease
the amount of soil
that we're using in the landfill and the excessive amount
of soil that's used
for cover is partly significantly part of it of what's
driving our airspace
consumption rate we're consuming airspace quicker than we
necessarily
have to do so we believe that we can decrease the number of
articulated
haul trucks at the site we could probably get by with less
than one
machine and we get into the question of having a backup and
how difficult is it
to find a backup in the market if one machine goes down
that also takes us
back to planning if we are planning to fill here this week
and that's all we
know if that truck goes down we're in it we're in trouble
because we've got to
haul dirt in for the next place we're going to fill but if
we knew that we
were going to be filling along that table for the next six
months we could
be putting soil strategically in those locations and if a
truck goes down right
there that's fine we've already placed soil we can use for
weeks and weeks and
we can we can keep up with that so the planning component
is a significant part
of the solution for all of this we think we can decrease
number of trucks and
certainly the number of truck hours by just being more
efficient with how we
use cover soil we also strongly recommend that we increase
the use of the
tarping machine out if you've been out there you've seen we
have a machine
called a tarpomatic it's a mechanical tarping machine it's
picked up by a
bulldozer or compactor and it rolls tarps out like a giant
paper towel roller
and covers the trash and that is called alternative daily
cover and just as a
point of reference when we covered and based on studies
that we've done across
the country when we cover trash with soil at a lined
landfill where airspace
is valuable that soil covering costs us between 50 cents
and a dollar a square
foot you could go to Home Depot or Lowe's buy cheap carpet
and roll it out
every day and save money as opposed to using soil so soil
is something we want
it we want to minimize to the extent we can the tarping
system on the other hand
cost between three and five cents a square foot to use that
it doesn't
because it doesn't consume airspace and so there are some
benefits to that we're
strongly recommend that we increase that and in the process
we think that we can
go from what's currently about 1,100 pounds per cubic yards
if we look at how
many tons of trash goes in and how much airspace that
consumes and we just do
the simple math don't extract dirt and add this and just
look at how many tons
of trash goes in how much airspace is consumed we are
consuming about 1,100
pounds or we're getting a density of about 1,100 pounds per
cubic yard that's
that's that's below what would be an industry norm for a
landfill like this
we think that by improving the operation we can get to
somewhere around 1,400 we've
seen similar landfills get as high as 1,600 pounds per
cubic yard and so the
little bit that we might benefit by shredding and grinding
material at the
BMR and touching it so many times is is no comparison in
terms of cost and
efficiency if we get things right at the face that where we
actually compact and
cover the trash we can get a significantly higher comp
action rate and
can consume much less airspace as we go so in summary we
think we should have a
soil management plan that's a long-term plan that shows us
how we're going to
develop material for example I can tell you that if you've
been out there in the
past couple of months we were there at the end of March we
had a large pile of
concrete and asphalt rubble that was right next to the big
stockpile of soil
that came out of our new lined area and the soil stockpile
was starting to erode
and cover up some of the concrete and asphalt rubble what
does that mean it
means at some point we're gonna have to pick that stuff up
again and screen it
or sort it again to get to it we need to have an annual
fill sequence plan
that shows us step by step where we're going to be that
includes having what
weather tipping pad so we can have access we need to
discontinue processing
rubble at least to the extent that we are right now we're
losing money at that
we're processing it beyond what is useful for us and it
doesn't make sense
the same for the BMR there can be some significant
reductions in costs without
any additional loss of airspace in fact by making some good
changes we can
actually improve our airspace consumption rate and finally
eliminate
the enhanced leachate recirculation process that's not
helping us right now
it's hurting us right now if we want landfill gas we can
start recirculating
leachate once that contract is changed and we actually own
the the
responsibilities for the gas so there are some other things
in the report
you'll find an appendix in the report that talks about a
typewriter type
system you'll see some information there about a pancake
type system and
those are all integrated to widen the face out give trucks
more room so that
it's safer and reduce dozer costs so the dozer doesn't have
to be on track on
call constantly and it also gives the compactors more room
to process just as
a quick note when compactors working in a very small space
they spend most of
their time slowing down or accelerating back up in very
little time in
production if any of you have been in a construction
industry and you've ever
seen a soil compactor work they make long runs and they
make them as fast as
they safely can do that so by giving us more space to work
at the face by
widening it out we make the site safer we're going to give
it to compactors an
opportunity to get much better compaction so we can get to
a situation
where we're saving a lot of money and we're also doing a
better job of
landing by just changing some of the things that we're
doing and actually
getting away from some of the ancillary processes that we
just adopted over time
Ron I think you're going to be up next any questions on the
landfill I'm sorry
there's another page here on the info so reduce the dozer
hours fully utilize the
compactors or get larger compactors reduce the articulated
truck hours
increase the tarping system and overall will increase that
effective density
we'll get better compaction at the landfill so any any
questions on
landfill stuff before we shift over to collections I have
on the enhanced
leachate recirculation so when does that contract end it's
actually up in 2024 any
chance we can amend it or is that we've had some
discussions with the the vendor
that's currently onside essentially it breaks down I think
Neil alluded to this
where the vendor or the contractor has the right but not
the obligation to
utilize that gas we have to the recommendations of Blue
Ridge scaled
back our recirculation of leachate by the fact is is the
gas output is such
that we could probably not put leachate on there we're
still going to be on the
gas curve to where gas outputs increased so we are working
with legal we've we've
taken a couple of runs at that contract we're certainly
going to continue to do
so okay so are we are we having the flare the gas now
excess gas yeah anytime
we have excess gas if it's exceeds production capacity then
we are flaring
okay
is the perimeter where the gas production and the gas
quality perhaps
sure great so they don't want it sure but that's what
causes you the migration
and it's always going to be like that to a degree but once
you once you have the
rights and the responsibility for it both you could go put
lower production
wells there to stop that migration this is a common problem
because many gas gas
contracts historically across the country were set up for
the companies
that wanted to take the gas to generate electricity or make
some energy make
pipeline quality gas do something with that and so they got
the rights but as
Ethan said they don't have the responsibilities for the
entire system
okay all right
collections mr. Proto Ron was my first boss in the garbage
business a long time
ago and when I went to the office the very first day I was
carrying a cup of
coffee like this because I was a country boy I never
carried coffee around in an
office before the wheel on the oh good you know every time
I listen to Neil's
presentations I learned something and I learned today that
landfills and uber
have something in common surge pricing I never realized
that again my name is Ron
Proto and I've been in the business a very long time when I
started we used to
go in your backyard empty your can put the lid on it and
hopefully close the
gate walked up seven stairs and dumped it into the truck I
've seen truck
pardon and you hang on the truck - yes jumped in it and put
sideboards up on it
because you didn't want to make three loads to the landfill
in those days
they call them dumps and so I've seen a tremendous amount
of changes in this
industry I've spent pretty much all my career on the
operating side the
collection side of the business although I did have a small
a small gig when I
helped develop a landfill for Oakland scavenger company so
let me see here
whoops went the wrong way the city of damp damn the first
thing I look for
when I come in to evaluate an operation is is all the
garbage and recycling
getting picked up every day and I'm happy to report all
your garbage your
trash municipal solid waste whatever you want to call it
and your recycling is
getting picked up every day there's no question about that
you're not leaving
blocks behind and it does happen in some communities if you
follow the industry
on some of the publications you'll see that sometimes not
all the garbage and
recycling gets picked up but that's not a problem in the
city of Denton you
provide a wide wide variety of services including solid
waste municipal solid
waste recycling bulky items and household chemicals and on
the commercial side
it's municipal solid waste recycling and food waste you're
just starting into the
food waste in some in in California that's a real big thing
green waste and
food waste I think by 2025 you can't put any of it into the
landfill on the
residential service each route makes about you know a
thousand to eleven
hundred lifts a day and the industry standard it for an
eight hour day is
about nine hundred and fifty to a thousand lifts a day one
of the things
although you're getting good production one of the things
that we would like to
see is that you conduct some kind of an objective survey to
see if you're getting
the most out of those residential routes because they are
working ten hours a day
they're not working eight they're working ten hours a day
and that's an
expansive day so it is recommended that you do a
comprehensive study an objective
study to see if you are getting a full day's work out of
those routes residential
recycling collection productivity is very low there's a one
-to-one relation
here in Denton there's a one-to-one relationship with the
recycling trucks
and the trash trucks and that's that's not very common
usually a recycling truck
because every lift they don't pick up as much and not every
customer puts out
their recycling every week they travel farther they usually
travel more one and
a quarter one and a third maybe one and a half routes but
you have a one-to-one
relationship so on a garbage route you're you're probably
getting 95 to 98
percent of the customers are setting their garbage out
every week whereas
recycling they're setting it out maybe 60 or 70 percent and
maybe even less so
those recycling drivers are picking up maybe six or seven
hundred houses a day
versus the almost thousand houses that a municipal waste
truck will be picked up
the recycling route use the same number of trucks as the
garbage routes yet they
collect only 22 percent of the residential tonnage so there
's something
that's not doesn't add up so what we're recommending is
that they audit the
residential recycling routes the setout rate now the setout
rate and
participation rate are two different things participation
rate is you put the
can out in the street once once a week once a month you're
participating in the
program the setout rate is how many people actually put it
out every week
and that's a very important number because that tells you
how to design
your routes how many lifts they're going to make so we're
recommending that
department make do a set out and a volume to look actually
look into the
carts to see how much is in there I did a study for a
jurisdiction in California
where I actually flipped the lids on on every not on every
route but on a lot of
routes and the recycling is all over the board but there
were a lot of carts that
weren't completely full quarter full half full and then yes
there's the carts
that are over full or somebody has two carts but I think
since you don't don't
know what the setout rate is it would be good to have
conduct that study so that
you can see it and then design more productive routes I
talk a little fast
sometimes so if you want me to slow down and and I'm just
really surprised that
the recycling isn't higher maybe it's just because I've
been recycling so long
yes our recycling is full our garbage is not yes in my
house it's the same thing
yeah I could probably put my garbage cart out I don't have
garbage in my cart
anymore because where I live they actually take the food
waste in with the
yard waste I could put my garbage cart out what they call
garbage cart out once
a month I just don't fill it up anymore just surprised me
yeah I know it's not
gonna it's not gonna increase the volume of tonnage that
you get in but if is
having smaller recycle bins increase your setout rate does
that make it more
efficient yes it definitely would but I believe you use a
64 gallon cart which
is pretty much the standard in the industry because that
material is bulky
it's light it's not very heavy but it's bulky so but there
are some
jurisdictions that you get somebody that just wants a
smaller cart they'll give
them a smaller cart but 64 is a pretty standard cart okay
so one of the things
to increase your lifts when you when you get in there would
be to just expand the
size of the route have the drivers drive over pass more
houses to get a full day's
work residential yard waste now this residential yard waste
has some
issues with it and that is it's in my view it's it's very
inefficient it has a
two-person crew and they drive by almost 2,000 houses per
day but average only a
hundred and twenty eight collections now that's an average
you have peak seasons
and they collect you know 300 maybe even 400 but on average
they collect 128 a day
and they collect less than four they collect less than four
tons per load and
that's about 50% of the trucks capacity it's not even being
utilized so the
recommendation that we have and you can see this here
before I recommend it in
this the upper photo that was just one little pile that we
saw it's very
inefficient it was down there you know the drivers are
gonna scoop it up by
hand they're gonna leave some behind they're gonna leave a
mess if you look
at the one on the bottom there that I drew a circle around
I mean that was on
a video that was posted on YouTube I mean the drivers tried
you know it was a
big pile of there they're grabbing it with their arms I
think that driver
there doesn't have a long-sleeve shirt on it's it's you
know it's not really
safe and they did they did leave a mess and as you can see
the last photo
sometimes they park on the wrong side of the street and
they collect both sides at
the same time so one member of the crew is walking across
the street in front of
traffic so it's not it's not very safe for the drivers so
we see is there
another slide on that no so what we're recommending I guess
I didn't put it
down here what we are recommending is that you consider
going to a cart based
system similar to what you have for recycling and municipal
solid waste now
it's not going to be as convenient for your customers but
it's going to be more
cost-effective and and efficient for for the city because
you can have a one
person driver operator operate the truck and go along and
just just like your
garbage trucks do and your recycling trucks do it's a lot
safer it's a lot
cleaner and it's way more efficient
bulky item collection now this is a this is a very
important service for the city
I did not drive around the whole city but I would guess
that you do have
probably have some illegal dumping in the city I'm not sure
but I would
imagine you have illegal dumping if you were to eliminate
bulky item collection
you'd have a whole lot more collection there so the crews
average about 35
collections a day which is very low some places go up as
high as 200 but you
know 150 125 is more the average and so you could run the
collection every other
week or every third week and you could adjust the schedule
seasonally adjust the
schedule based on the service or I know this sounds counter
intuitive but you
could promote the program more to get people to use the
program and perhaps
reduce the amount of illegal dumping that goes on in the
city
household chemical collection this this is you folks
provide valet household
chemical collection you know you go door to door to pick it
up somebody called
a customer resident call in make an appointment you go pick
it up usually I
mean they there are communities that do it it's very
expensive but usually what
is done is they'll have a facility where residents can drop
it off rather than go
door-to-door and collect it and as you can see here there's
3800 almost 3900
pickups meaning that only 12% of the residents utilize the
service but that's
like 15 pickups a day it's it's not a lot of there's not a
lot of pickups out
there so there is there are some grants I believe that you
folks can apply for
that could help you to and get permits to help you
establish a program perhaps
on the same site that it is now
commercial garbage collection I still call it I mean a rose
by any other name
is still a rose commercial garbage front loaders average
about 102 lifts per day
the industry standard is somewhere between 125 and 150
lifts a day
depending upon route density distance from the landfill and
one other thing
that's very very important if you drive around the city of
Denton you'll see all
your you won't see a cart that has any wheels on it that is
not common that is
ideal that is like a dream route where the driver rolls up
to the container and
what I call stabs it the only time the driver has to get
out of the truck is
maybe to open up a gate for an enclosure back out and do it
I rode with one of
the drivers and he did that on a couple of occasions so
there unless I'm missing
something there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to
get up closer to
the hundred and twenty five or fifty lifts per day and the
way you can do
that is you can eliminate one Monday through Friday route
and one Saturday
route now you have two Saturday routes and the reason you
have two Saturday
routes because someone thought that it would be advantage
ous to have two
drivers out there instead of one in case something went
wrong I come from the
school is if you have a problem call your supervisor
because your supervisor
has the wherewithal and the resources to help you out when
I looked at the
Saturday routes I forget the exact number but there was a
88 88 something
like that 90 customers really didn't need Saturday service
they had three
times a week or less service normally the hurdle for
Saturday service is not
universal but the hurdle rate is four times a week service
so they go Monday
Wednesday and Friday and Saturday because they can't hold
over for the
weekend but there were several twice a week customers some
one time a week
customers so it's not like you're stopping Saturday service
you're just
condensing Saturday service and moving that over through
Monday Monday through
Friday routes and you can increase those lifts to about 120
a day which is more
in line with what they should be the commercial recycling
routes are similar
situation their lift count is only 68 per day you have a
very complicated
schedule half-day route here half-day route there pick up
trash or pick up one
commodity here pick up one another commodity here and
whenever you have
half-day routes you lose productivity you just have to keep
working at and
working at it and in addition this truck picks up less than
50% of the trucks
carrying capacity so again we recommend consider a complete
review of the
commercial recycling system and then depending upon what
you find is to
redesign the routes to increase the lift count to about 150
a day again that
shouldn't be a problem because you drive directly into the
bins occasionally the
driver has to get out to move the open or close a gate
multifamily recycling we
understand that that's an interest of the city and there's
no question that
you can do multifamily recycling but there's a there's a
caution here I don't
know if you folks follow the recycling markets and what's
going on in China now
California is a big big recycler that's where I come from
California they are
choking on recycling they cannot get rid of their recycling
their residual rates
in California generally from a materials recovery facility
was about 10% now
they're approaching 25 and 35% they just to clean the
material up and even at
that point sometimes they can't get rid of the material so
if you do go into and
multifamily recycling is the most difficult recycling to
pick up it is
usually highly contaminated so if you do decide to go into
multifamily
recycling we recommend you go with caution fleet
maintenance a major
complaint and a source of frustration was that from the
drivers was it takes
too long to get the truck repaired and so the drivers were
avoiding dropping
off their truck unless it was absolutely necessary and this
is a serious safety
concern but also exactly excess excess or baits the
maintenance time issue of
the maintenance we looked through one of the reports a
driver complained about his
truck and his truck was in there for like 13 days but then
when we looked at
the notes that were in there the reason it was in for 13
days is there were so
many things that were wrong with it some of them that were
obvious the driver
should have turned in like the fender was you know rattling
really loose that
the tarping mechanism has happened to be a roll-off truck
and the tarping
mechanism that goes back the cylinders and we're leaking
and the long hose was
leaking and that's because they don't want to bring it in
because it takes too
long but because they don't want to bring it in it takes
too long because
there's too many things your mechanics from my
understanding or train when a
truck comes in you don't fix just what's on the service
order you fix everything
you find so when they do a preventative maintenance they
find several things
that are wrong so they have to fix all of it so one of the
things that we
recommend recommended is that there be periodic meetings
between fleet
maintenance services and the drivers and this allows the
groups to have a mutual
understanding of the challenges drivers face and also the
technicians face and
sort of bring them together to talk about the problems I'm
gonna see if
there's one more here there's another issue is the city of
Denton fleet
maintenance has 16 technicians to that take care of about 1
,100 assets now this
includes pickup trucks little vans and everything and to be
fair the the the
actually industry standard is seven to ten trucks for a
technician now I know
when a garbage truck goes in there fire engines is going to
take precedent over
it there's no question about I don't know what the ratio is
for mechanics to
fire trucks but I know on I can go just about any
maintenance program that's
running efficiently there's seven to ten trucks for every
mechanic and so there
is the department needs to add more mechanics in order to
get turn over the
trucks quicker the other the other fact is that the
maintenance facility is four
miles away from the collection department and makes
dropping off the
trucks very inconvenient a driver drops off a truck someone
has to bring the
driver back to the to the to the corporation yard they have
to pick up a
truck in the morning somebody has to take the driver to go
down and pick up
the truck it's very inconvenient one of the things that we
heard when we were
here is that there was anticipated that there was going to
be a fleet maintenance
annex built at the corporation yard and it was sort on hold
we also when we
talked to the fleet service superintendent said that they
were running out of room
and that they wanted to expand their shop so it looks like
everything if they
could coordinate that get the shop built at the corporation
yard and get the
mechanics right there drivers will probably turn in their
trucks more
frequently when it needs repair and they'll be timely
repaired collection
summary conduct an objective study on residential municipal
solid waste routes
as I said you're doing about a thousand lifts a day that's
pretty good but
remember you work ten hours a day and not eight hours a day
so they might be
able to be increased audit the residential recycling south
's for set
out rate and cart volume then adjust the routes accordingly
and then consider
using a cart based yard waste system and then consider the
bulky collection every
other week or every third week to increase the collections
to 70 or 100
per day or publicize the program more to try to increase
the number of residents
and discontinue the household hazardous collection
residential collection
service and open up a regional facility and have people
drop it off at the
facility rather than provide a valet service we have a lot
of
recommendations on the collection side eliminate one Monday
through Friday and
one Saturday commercial route to increase the lift counts
to about 120 a
day consider a complete review of the commercial recycling
system to increase
lift counts to around 150 a day before expanding multif
amily recycling services
wait for current markets to stabilize and conduct further
further resident
utilization analysis conduct periodic meetings between
fleet maintenance
services and drivers and increased fleet services
department staff to achieve a
ratio of one technician every set seven to ten vehicles and
constructing a
maintenance shop annex close to the parking where the
trucks parked I'm
going to turn this back over to Neil so this is a third
component of what we
looked at talked about landfills we talked about
collections this is kind of
the overall aspect of that I'm going to talk about safety
there is not a good
safety culture in the department right now we saw a lot of
folks that weren't
wearing high visibility safety apparel and they should
supervisors or managers
also need to be doing they need to set the example no one
should ever go out
into the yard or onto the landfill if they step out of a
vehicle and any any
part of the operations they should have a safety vest with
them we found that
the safety meetings and we sat in on one we talked to folks
about other ones they
weren't focused on specific things they were just more
general there were there
were some discussions in there there weren't a lot of
safety slogans and
posters there just wasn't a lot of evidence that we're
really focused on on
safety just to give you a little feedback the waste
business is the
fifth most dangerous industry in the United States based on
fatalities per
number of workers following logging and offshore fishing
and roofing I don't
recall what the other one is air pilots and we're number
five and so part of the
process for this is to just make safety more of a vested
interest for everyone
on the team so we're recommending that everyone in any part
of the operations
if they're on the ground outside your vehicle outside the
office that they
have a high visibility safety vest everyone we need to have
safety
meetings that are more applicable and so general topics
that a safety meeting is
fine at times but there are a lot of specific things that
should be dealt
with and that that involves some more or requires some more
involvement from
supervisors or whoever's leading the safety meetings to
talk about near misses
and what are some of the issues we're having on the riot
route what are some
issues we're having at the landfill things like that we
need to have basic
standard operating procedures for everyone at the landfill
on under routes
and here's one of the things that we find is lacking our
company does a lot
of surveys around the United States and Canada we find that
90% of those
managers and supervisors that we survey the facilities that
we survey say we
really don't have all of our safety documents and all of
our standard
operating procedures formalized we just sort of learn by
doing and we learn by
tradition and that's how we do that if you translate that
and take that further
down the line that means that 90% of our folks don't have
good standard
operating procedures there's not a standard process and so
if we were to
quiz everyone and ask how do we do this we wouldn't get the
same answer and we
didn't get the same answer so we need to have some standard
procedures for how we
do things this is basic stuff we looked at the
organizational structure what we
found was that the department is generally management heavy
and partly
that become that's because I believe we have a lot of
peripheral processes that
we're doing the ELR and the BMR and the concrete and
asphalt all of that Ron can
speak to some of the numbers that we found with collections
but we just found
a lot of management compared to the number of workers so we
think that some
of the operations have to be discontinued decreased let's
get through
some of this so collections management positions constitute
16% of the staff
industry standards about 10% so if you look at the staff
about 10% of our
collection staff should be supervisors or managers for us
at 16% normally
collections supervisors have six to nine employees the
report to them or that
they're supervising that's 30 to 50 percent below the
industry standards so
again we just have we have too many management folks a lot
of the
collection supervisors spend a lot of their time doing
administrative things
we're having an administrative assistant IE a secretary
someone else to do some
of the paperwork could be a huge benefit those folks should
be involved in
managing their routes and their drivers and not doing
administrative tasks I
think that Ron if you have a comment on this the
collections dispatching
supervision of backup drivers and fleet maintenance need to
be addressed as part
of this whole process in other words how are we structured
how is the collection
system structured in that regard special projects new
operations we can we can
back I think we need to the gist of this is we need to step
back to our core
operations and make sure we're focusing on getting those
right so we think as a
recommendation we can reduce three managers and four
supervisor positions
within the department basically dissolve the site
operations division which was
all of the special projects where those were coming from
and assign some
planning and special projects to the landfill manager we
think that the scale
house should be assigned to the administration manager so
that there's a
little closer communication between what's happening in the
scale and what's
happening operationally I think we should have a dispatch
operation which
speaks more to the collections side of things and the an
cillary services should
just be under a facility supervisor so that in other words
when we have
additional things that we're doing at the facility that we
have someone who is
who's coordinating that and managing that specifically so
this table here shows
where we are currently and kind of what we're recommending
on the landfill side
and this chart you're probably not going to be able to see
Ethan are you going to
talk about this in more detail do you want me to go through
this or do you
want to talk about that okay this is going to be hard for
everyone to see I
think I saw some of your stuff and it looks like it's maybe
a little bit
clearer to see that Ron any comments on that on the
collection stuff I know
better sorry this is just a graphical representation of the
slide before is
consolidating the the supervisors and the managers we're
not adding any we
added two new positions but we're not adding two new staff
in the collections
and that is a full-time dispatcher and also a fleet our
facilities maintenance
supervisor so it's just removing the people around shuff
ling them around any
questions thank you very much thank you thank you very much
thank you Ron so I know I know this report's fairly dense
and I'm not going
to be going through in detail kind of the management
response but I do want to
hit a few key items see if I can't find my presentation
here seems to have
disappeared on me all right I think my presentation got
deleted
it's a Monday right well I appreciate Ron and Neil going
through that again I
know this a dense presentation so like I mentioned at the
outset what I'm going
to attempt to do is just kind of break this down between
really two sections of
recommendations and responses for most of the operational
recommendations I'm
not going to spend a lot of time going through that up here
let me get my
bearings real quick I'll probably just hit the highlights
and then I'll field
questions on the operational stuff that you've seen there
are two items that I
want to hit at the outset and number one is the
organizational restructure to
Ron's point I do want to provide a little bit of additional
texture to that
in terms of the management restructure really what we look
at from our
perspective is that we have an abundance of managers in the
operation but we also
have some pressing needs in some areas as you've seen
through their report in
terms of helping us to improve planning and operations we
are proposing adding a
deputy director position for training and safety we feel
like that's a key
point of emphasis for us we don't want to put our drivers
our employees or the
public at risk and so we want to bring in a training and
safety coordinator to
help coordinate those efforts fleet was a big issue that
was identified in this
the timely maintenance of our fleet so we are recommending
adding some of that
and we'll bring that forward in the department's budget in
the next few
weeks in terms of the management positions I think one of
the things I
would say is we have an abundance of really good people at
our side and we
want to make sure that we handle this with care and that we
approach this in
fairness and that we try to take care of our employees as
best we can a few
things that we want to try to see out of the organizational
restructure is
improving communication when you have multiple layers of
management sometimes
it's like the game of telephone in grade school is the
messages don't always get
up and down the chain of command as well as they should and
that's one of the
things that I've kind of seen in my time there and I think
Ron and Neil picked up
on some of that as well right now we have basically
supervisor by committee so
a lot of our collections operators in particular they have
four supervisors and
what ends up happening is when you don't have just one
person where you can go
talk to the communication can sometimes overlap sometimes
there's a difference
in opinion on what action should be taken and it really
slows us down as
unnecessary so we're gonna be correcting that too overall
we are really trying to
take a hard look at redefining job descriptions and job
responsibilities
especially in lieu of some of the things that we heard from
Blue Ridge so our
plan is to to begin the organizational restructure
immediately and then try to
have that wrapped up before the turn of the fiscal year in
terms of the program
recommendations these are not as simple as turnkey we
certainly want to make
sure that the public utilities board as well as the council
have an opportunity
to weigh in on these so what we're proposing from a
management standpoint is
that we supplement the analysis that Blue Ridge has done
that I think they've
done a fantastic job in a very short period of time more
than anything else
some of the recommendations like the recycling audit is we
really need to get
out boots on the ground do our own audit take a little bit
more time with it and
then look and see what are those results really telling us
you know should we
expand our route size should we try to adjust our program
in some manner what
we want to do is make basically maintain the good
components of our programs while
making them as efficient as they can be so so after that
analysis is done we
want to circle back to the board as well as the City
Council provide you the
results of our analysis which will be financial feasibility
operational
efficiency and then seek direction we do have one on on the
presentation this
evening that I'll get to in just a second what I've
included down here some
of the major program recommendations that Neil and Ron made
is kind of a
schedule for us coming back to the board and the council
for discussion I think
what we've tried to do in terms of organizing these and we
're open to
comment is to take the largest in terms of the financial
commitment and some of
the more inefficient programs that warrant quick inspection
particularly
for BMR and robo processing I think the question we're
gonna be asking the board
and the council is do we want to continue with this in our
budget or do we
want to try to start making some adjustments before we come
back to you
this summer so let's dive into that real quick in terms of
rubble slash BMR and I
think you are definitely served and kind of taking a look
at these as two
separate entities because I think that's ultimately what we
probably end with in
terms of a recommendation we kind of validated what Blue
Ridge's results were
we found that diversion was actually 10% on both of those
operations give or take
for rubble over the last five years we've accepted over 300
,000 tons I'll
show you a photo of some of the stockpiles that we have out
there in a
moment but it is significant in a lot of cases you kind of
look at this as
inventory if you will and like Ron or like Neil was saying
is if this sits on
the ground long enough it's going to be required to be
reprocessed and
resorted and at that point this isn't an asset anymore it's
actually a liability
and we put some dollar amounts to that in just a moment and
I want to revisit
my statement from earlier is if our goal for both rubble
and BMR processing is to
divert materials away and safely and fill airspace we have
a decision to make at
the gate is do we want to accept this material or not
unlike waste that we
serve the community in the surrounding area with rubble and
asphalt we have a
decision and we can either price it to make sure that we're
only accepting
exactly what we need or do we just put a sign up that says
we're not accepting
that there are other alternatives for other operations to
exploit in addition
what you want to see with these operations is if you're
hitting your
diversion targets are you recovering the the expense
through sales revenue
doesn't always pay to recycle sometimes it's about doing
the right thing and I
think what we want to try to put in front of the board and
the council is
there's dollars and cents associated with this we're not as
we're not trying
to eliminate a program that both the board or the council
wants to keep but
we owe it to you all to be very candid and very upfront
about here are the
facts of how the program is performing here's the cost
associated with it so
on both of these you can see that we we've diverted about
10% for the rubble
that is particularly troublesome because now we have an
asset or liability that
we have to try to move off site and it's going to be it's
going to be a tough
task here are some of the rubble stockpiles that we have at
the facility
here on the left as Ron mentioned earlier you have the soil
on the back
and it's kind of impeding into the unprocessed rubble here
's kind of gives
you an idea of the scale of the stockpile here with some of
our equipment
this is actually processed concrete here that's that's into
aggregate and so
we've had this stockpile for the better part of the year
since I've been out
there we really don't have a material right now in that
stockpile that's
meeting spec for a lot of large construction operations to
use we've had
some some folks kind of poke around and see if they could
use it and unfortunately
we just haven't been able to move it off site so with this
we have kind of a
challenge ahead of us is if we do not move this off site I
'm going to draw your
attention to the bottom right hand corner here the realized
airspace savings
we can apply basically a cost per cubic yard that's the
revenue that we bring in
for a cubic yard of airspace and so at that 10% diversion
rate you know it
looks like we've saved about 1.4 million dollars in terms
of these operations
combined if we're unable to move that rubble off site we
may actually end up
consuming about 6.2 million dollars worth of airspace and
so again if we're
looking at what is the purpose of these operations if
saving airspace is a top
priority we need to be very careful about what we allow
into our facility and
the stuff that needs to be here the municipal solid waste
to the building
materials that's where our diversion efforts really need to
be focused to be
staff's recommendation to go back to the overall financials
of this the rubble
slash BMR budget for fiscal year 18 19 we're projecting a
loss of about 2.4
million dollars what that means that loss equates to if you
break that out
over our traditional diversion rate is it cost us about 383
dollars per ton to
divert material understand that it's and I'm not saying to
dispose of things in
the landfill other diversion operations are much more
economical in that 323
dollars not 383 I apologize understand that it cost us
about 38 dollars per
ton to dispose of material so it's almost a tenfold
increase in the
diversion for these two operations our approach from a
staff standpoint over
here is kind of the historical losses on that I don't need
to belabor the point
our recommendation would be to at least for the time being
eliminate the rubble
operation we do not need to accept any additional concrete
or asphalt we're
gonna have a hard time continuing with the asset slash
liability that we have
on site from the building materials recovery I think Neil
put it really well
is we need to reevaluate how we're going about that
operation we have a number of
issues on site I took a photo this morning as I entered the
facility about
illegal dumping this is our recycling drop-off site on the
corner of May Hill
this is this is not an extraordinary day this is another
day at the office coming
into our facility is unfortunately folks aren't using this
responsibly and so
what we would propose is let's eliminate some of the more
costly components of
the building materials recovery operation namely a lot of
the big pieces
of equipment let's repurpose that as a public drop-off area
it would be a man
site where we can divert what's what's reasonable to divert
shedding some of the
cost but also moving the recycling drop-off site behind the
gate and really
unfortunately when you have a situation like this none of
this is probably
getting recycled we've run a few loads through Pratt on
these sites and it's up
to 80 90 percent contamination and it's really unfair to
the folks that are
using those sites responsibly that this is happening but I
think that's an
opportunity for us to address a few problems all at once by
by repurposing
that operation the reason why we're asking for that is we
are going to be
coming back to the board and the council within the next
few weeks to talk about
number one our budget but also understand that any loss
that we take in
an operation like the BMR or rebel processing that has to
be made up
somewhere in our operation in terms of revenue and that
requires rate
subsidization if we were to step away from these operations
and try to
extract ourselves from some of the costly equipment
components you probably
have very minimal upfront savings you're still going to
have to contend with some
debt service on the equipment but by year five you probably
stepped away from
sixty to seventy five percent of the expense so I know that
's a lot to take
in I'm talking really fast but I wanted to kind of put that
out there this
evening and just kind of take the public utilities boards
guidance on that
comments I agree to eliminate the rubble that's that's not
a solid waste issue
that's that's outside of what our core services should have
been I'm not sure
how we got into that but that's that's not handling mixed
municipal solid waste
and we'll be more yes and I think reconfiguring we can make
that more
effective I think we want to protect the diversion rate but
understand on the
rebel if we don't accept it it's already diverted and right
now we're losing air
space as a result of that operation so do we have some
financials that show us
like each year how we did I mean I know I've gone out there
and the rubble has
been gone and the pile gets built up again and then it goes
away so is there
you know before we pull the trigger on any decisions is
there a way we can see
I mean did we lose a customer and that's no longer buying
it from us anymore is
that what's happened I mean something's had to have
happened or we would have
realized this three years ago that it was not a money-
making or not profitable
situation it's a in terms of our evaluation and the
challenge in terms of
our budget and we'll talk more about this in a few weeks is
a lot of these
operations were co-mingled under the landfill budget when
we break this apart
and we start looking at what were the actual expenses of
the operation it's
difficult for us to nail down exactly was that expense
truly for that operation
was something else what's not difficult to assess is the
revenue that's coming
in off of these operations and so this goes back to 2014
the gate revenue is
essentially what we charged for people entering the
facility to dispose a rubble
and or the BMR gate rate or no I'm sorry this is just rub
ble on this one of the
challenges or maybe one of the reasons the explanations of
why that stockpile
so great is we were charging below gate rates in terms of
bringing the material
into the facility and so there was some incentive for some
of these contractors
to haul their rubble here in terms of that the commodity
sales understand that
these figures up here include sales that we're making to
ourselves as an
organization and so as best I can tell we don't have a
market that's ever
materialized for this material you know you can certainly
look at that and say
we should do a better job of marketing it but I think we
have what I in my
estimation would be an inferior product at this stage and
so we really have our
work cut out for us to figure out how are we going to move
this material
off-site and or draw it down as Neil said and use it in our
operations I think at
the current burn rate that we have for using this material
on-site it would
take us about ten years to burn through the stockpile and
so it's really going
to be I think whenever we say eliminate rebel operations we
're really talking
about preventing the stockpiles from going any larger and
before we can get it
just to allow us an opportunity to get our feet under us to
really assess can
we take what we have on-site and make a marketable product
and if not we need to
start planning on how we're going to go through that stockp
ile operationally I
hope all that makes sense but it's kind of where we are in
space and time
thinking through this and so I just thought you said that
maybe these numbers
were only rubble or do they include the BMR so the gate
revenue is only rubble
because understand the stuff that goes through the BMR we
're going to accept
that no matter what and so that's really not a factor of
the evaluation when you
look at the BMR making or breaking even what you want to
see is processing the
materials and selling the commodities pays for that
diversion operation from
rubble you have the opportunity to charge a different rate
at the gate to
either accept or not accept the material so you want to
factor that in do we
still I'm sorry do we still not take lumber from the BMR
and grind it and put
it in our dino dirt the lumber has never been used in that
operation now there
was an operation that was canceled in December where the
ground up lumber was
being used as compost for liquid products but that was a
hundred percent
waste products it was never fully diverted and then back to
the gate
revenue we were below market so we ended up being the
dumping ground because we
were the cheapest alternative which that's how business
works that's correct
yeah and that kind of goes back to you know who's bringing
it in is it I mean it
may be worth driving from some other part of the region
just to bring it if
it's cheaper and you know if we're sitting on ten years
worth of rubble at
this point I don't see how you could I mean I guess there
is a price you could
take it but I don't know that I mean you're it's costing to
store it but then
again I go back to that's not our core service right our
services right a mix
municipal solid waste and maybe the idea of accepting rub
ble is you know we can
use it for our own bring it in for our own use yes at the
landfill right but
not make a doesn't sound like you can make an enterprise
out of it not not
currently I mean we were certainly gonna you know kind of
sharpen our pencils on
this and see if there's some potential there too I mean we
've got to deal with
what we have on site yeah and I think if we find something
that looks promising
there we'll certainly run an analysis on it understand that
a lot of the rubble
that we process is from the city of Dunn streets department
and streets projects
in the city and so what would be ideal is if we can find a
way to get out from
underneath the stockpile and take in just enough material
to suit our
operational needs at the solid waste department and I think
like Neil said
we're over processing that stuff right now to make an
inferior product and an
attempt to sell it and this doesn't have the operational
value that we need on
site either so I think there may be a sweet spot here and
we're certainly
going to be exploring that can you go back a couple slides
to the household
hazardous waste oh you don't need this like never mind I'll
just ask is there
any concern that now you know it's valet any concern that
if we don't do that
then household hazardous waste is gonna end up in the
garbage and end up in the
landfill it's a possibility now and now one of the things
that I haven't done
the full analysis on it but we've done some some
preliminary work and this may
be a situation what we've done since Neil and Ron Ron side
is we've actually
combined the household chemical collection with our
appliance and
electronic collection those were kind of two separate
things before and so what
we've tried to do is combine those and get more
participation and so when we
did that you essentially double up the amount of
participation that we're
getting in addition we announced a few weeks ago kind of a
soft launch if you
will of dropping off allowing drop-off of materials at the
side and so we want
to try to give both of those kind of their day in court and
see how that
works in addition reducing from the collection route we run
some preliminary
numbers I don't think it's going to make a huge difference
in terms of the
overall rates and so I think there may be an opportunity
with how we've
structured it now that we may be able to get some better
results out of it or
down the drain which would be worse yeah I have a few
questions for you how do we
come up with a value for a cubic meter of air sure so in
terms of a cubic yard
as Neil pointed out during his presentation it's really
about
compaction rates right now we're at about 1,100 pounds per
cubic yard now
some materials a little bit more dense than others and so
we we have in terms
of this analysis adjusted these a little bit concrete's
much more dense than a
roll of toilet paper obviously and so whenever you do that
you can actually
start assigning a dollar amount we charge per ton as you
enter the facility
and so it really becomes a conversion of math equation if
you will of how much
can we fit into an average cubic yard and right now we come
up with about $16
now that's that's always in flux if we increase our comp
action rate if we
change our rates the cost of processing that material it
can move a little bit
and so that that's kind of the formula that we've applied
to this and are and
the numbers that we use for our purposes are based on 1,100
pounds
currently yes that's what we're performing it so is that I
know we're
this will come to us the budget yet to come to us finalized
but you know where
is where is this going to show up from a right standpoint
that's a great segue
I'm going to circle back to the operational stuff and stand
for
questions on that but I want to talk a little bit about
next steps like I said
at the outset we really broke this up into program changes
operational changes
unless the board of the council has any concerns about the
operational
recommendations we're going to proceed kind of phasing in
those implementations
from the programs it will be proceeding with the schedule
that I gave you all a
little bit earlier in terms of next steps we do have a cost
of service which
is essentially a rate study being performed by new gen
right now we do
have that teed up to come back to the pub on July 9th so
you'll be seeing a
little bit of the rate implication on some of these
programs what we've really
tried to do is parse out all of our operations into
separate business units
that allows for easy evaluation of the financials and then
you can kind of
carry that over to where does that where does that show up
in our rates and so
new gen will be providing that discussion shortly following
that we're
currently scheduled for our department budget presentation
on July 23rd our
goal was to have kind of the operational strategic
discussion with you all on
council tomorrow come back and show you the rate
implications and then come back
with a finalized budget I know there's a great desire there
has been in the past
and currently and hopefully in the future but to make sure
that we're doing
we're innovative in the way we approach our landfill and
our solid waste as far
as renewability and doing as much as we can to be good
stewards of that but you
know it's just like the mining operation sometimes you have
to look at what the
real cost is and just weigh the benefit and see if it's you
know if it's worth
doing or maybe offering the program in some way I think in
addition to this I
know we talked a little bit about financials and what is
the cost of a
program and I don't want it to be lost that the we're also
very much want to
focus on what is the value what's the participation rate of
a program are we
getting good value for those those dollars spent and I
think kind of like we
did with the rebel processing tonight is if the name of the
game is to divert
stuff away from the landfill is 10% an acceptable rate and
if that's the case
then you know this is the cost for that diversion and we
definitely feel like
those things it's not all about saving money but it's also
about making sure
that the program is performing as expected and bringing
that back to the
board and the council on a regular basis so you can either
give us a stamp of
approval or we can go back to the drawing board and work on
it again
comments well you know I think I think the three hundred
twenty three dollars a ton is pretty telling for what you
know that's kind of the cost of it so is it worth three
hundred twenty three dollars a ton to do that that's kind
of where we come I
think I think if I've heard the recommendation tonight is
we will
certainly go back and start running some numbers on what is
at least from the
rebels standpoint what is the next strategy look like like
I said the
upfront savings may not be significant because the debt
service on the
equipment but we'll run out of five-year scenario and then
we'll also inform our
rate consultant that that's that's what we need to carry
forward for your next
presentation and so if you modify any of those other
programs we're talking about
you'll come back to us and we'll discuss that most
certainly and I think
especially when it comes to something like curbside
recycling and programs like
that you know those are those are near and dear to a lot of
folks hearts and we
want to make sure that we have good data for you I think
Neil and Ron did a
tremendous amount of work with their short time on on site
some of this is
going to be a little bit more involved to where we really
need to get out there
and understand what we're dealing with in the community so
I would expect a lot
more information coming from us in the next you know six to
nine months on those
programs I have a couple more things real quick oh sorry it
seems like a while
back we approved cameras for our the recycling places the
self-serve
recycling places we thought we approved some kind of
monitoring system for those
places we have cameras on this site right here
unfortunately one of the
things we may need to talk about is what does enforcement
look like for
illegal dumping and unfortunately the cameras that we have
out there we've
tried to you know pull a license plate or something and the
film quality is not
good enough for us to do that I think that's certainly
something that we would
want to explore especially if we this drop-off site is is
probably I mean it's
problematic fortunately it's on our site and so we can do
something pretty
immediate about it some of our remote drop-off sites we don
't want to eliminate
those but what we may be talking about is how do we how do
we improve or prevent
illegal dumping from happening because it's it's really a
drag on the program
whenever those those canisters come in and it's 90%
contamination it defeats
the purpose we at one point in time I believe that was it
might have been with
the police department there was a truck and a person who
drove around and there
was a number you could call like you know 390 dump or
something like that to
report illegal dumping perhaps in the organizational rest
ructuring there'll be
some money for something like that it's a good thought this
is notorious
everywhere in the country you have a drop-off you get junk
yeah you either
got a manate or have some enforcement measures or secure it
in some way
somewhere yeah and now I forgot oh I do I do remember my
question um not that we
would change out trucks but what is your opinion on the
trucks that are both a
recycling and a garbage truck all in one so you're making
one pass is that I mean
it's it's been popular then it's not been popular then you
know plus the
wear and tear on the streets do you mean a split body truck
that yeah yes I
learned something every day in this industry I was not a
fan of split body
trucks because one side packs usually packs out before the
other side either
the garbage packs out first or the recycling packs out but
I just was
working with a company where they have actually and you
might even want to
consider this even if you don't go to that they have four
axle trucks that
they run on the street and they're getting nine and a half
tons in a split
body truck and I'm going whoa how did that happen but that
's what they get I
guess they've done a great job in training their their
drivers to to do it
the right way but they got great results and yes that's
definitely a
consideration and there's one truck less that goes down the
street just have to
work out the math on it and see if that works for you but
that's definitely an
opportunity for you okay thank you any other questions or
comments for Ethan
no thank you for your time thank you appreciate it okay
item B is to receive a report hold a discussion and give
staff direction
regarding the air emissions testing at Nitten Energy Center
conducted by
Black and Beach Corporation I wanted to say I counted 282,
000 numbers in there
but I'd be just kidding George Morrow DME general manager
pleased to be here
today to let you know that we've completed the emissions
testing for the
Denton Energy Center Black and Beach was owner engineer for
us and they were
responsible for contracting for the testing services and to
evaluate and
manage the report have a couple of gentlemen who are with
us today Paul Lee
and Stephen Baker from Black and Beach their air quality
engineers and they
have a I think compared to what we just heard a short
presentation not a short
report Paul you want to good evening and thank you guys for
having me again so
the agenda is pretty simple we're just going to provide you
an overview of the
testing that we did and then obviously give you a high
level results of the
emissions tests and then I'm going to hand over to George
and he's going to
just talk about some of the paths forward for the Denton
Energy Center so
again my name is Paul Lee I'm an air quality engineer with
Black and Beach to
go over the roles of the different entities that were
involved in the
project Black and Beach we were hired as the owner's
engineer the engineer on the
project was Burns McDonald and as OE we basically just
checked some of the work
that he did also included in our scope was the emissions
testing Black and
Beach we were an international firm we work in many
industries but power had
was I think classically back in the day what we really
caught our teeth in and
with that we had to demonstrate the emissions testing to
prove that we mean
the permits of state federal regulations and the contracts
that we signed with
different manufacturers so we were hired on as to to
overview or have oversight of
the emissions testers we contracted with our hygiene air
hygiene is one of the
nation's leaders in emissions testing they're accredited by
the source testing
accreditation council or stack they're accredited as an air
emissions testing
body a TB and as part of that they have QA test plans that
you have to have
reviewed they have audits every other year so there's a
fair amount of clout
that they have that they have by being a TB also within our
hygiene they brought
many people on site to do the testing because we have 12
engines and we're
working pretty hardcore around the clock there's something
called a qualified
stack testing individual or QSTI a lot of times testing
programs will have you
know one or two of them and underneath the two QSTI so that
act as managers
there's a just qualified individuals but on this project we
were fortunate not to
have five QSTIs to be a QSTI one you had to demonstrate
competency but the main
way you do that is by passing a test every five years you
have to re pass
that test and there's a set of tests that you do in order
to be a QSTI so
those are the companies that we that were involved in the
project just
something to note air hygiene they're pretty familiar with
rices not just
words little races but all type of races but they
specifically as a nationwide
firm have done and counting 55 words all projects some of
them ranging from one
engine to the dead engine center which was obviously 12 I
was told at your last
board meeting there are some questions regarding NSPS and N
ACS so just want to
take a quick side and try to explain at a high level those
two terms so NSPS is
new source performance standards oftentimes you'll hear 40
CFR 60 those
are the same thing so new source performance standards were
a very long
set of federal regulations that were passed way back when
that are technology
based so if you're a waste incinerator you're covered under
NSPS if you're a
coal fire power plant you have a different section in this
PS that same
also applies for rices as we have here so there are some
federal regulations
based on tick the technology you are that fall under NSPS N
ACS is related but
a different term and different regulations so next stands
for national
ambient air quality standards so that is what the EPA has
set for seven criteria
pollutants the term criteria pollutants are just pollutants
that they have
identified that they feel are detrimental to or can be
detrimental to human health
so they have mandated a certain emission limit well not
mission limit but just an
ambient air limit and that's it the individual states have
to come up with
an implementation plan to submit to the federal government
to show the federal
government how they're going to meet the NACS within the
state and implementation
plan that covers a lot of the permits that they provide to
all facilities so
that's your power plants again waste incinerators paper
mills auxiliary
boilers at mining facilities so the statement of the
station plan has to
consider all of those in effect when they submit to the
federal government so
those are two sort of parallel federal regulations going on
hopefully that that
makes sense at a high level but there are a lot more intric
acies that I guess
we'll we'll table for later but please ask me questions if
you would like any
right now or okay all right so the testing occurred May 17
th through May
20th we try to do four engines a day the test protocol was
submitted on April
11th by air hygiene to TCEQ generally you're supposed to
submit 30 days prior
to your testing and we did do that no comments were
received from the TCEQ and
that's pretty standard most states don't ever comment
unless they have a problem
with your test protocol silence is implied acceptance TCEQ
was invited to
witness firsthand with a representative our emissions
testing but they chose not
to participate so the the pollutants in the table and the
EPA methods are shown
right there we tested knocks CEO VOC's ammonia and PM which
stands for
particulate matter going back to NACS I like to just point
out we actually did
not test for any NACS however ozone is one the criteria
pollutants and knocks
and VOCs are precursors to ozone formation so just in case
that was ever
brought up in previous conversations the test durations for
all the gases knocks
CEO VOC's and ammonia they were all one hour PM we tested
for generally two
hours the reason why I say generally is because we're more
concerned about the
volume of sample that we have that's supposed to the actual
time we try to
have a sample rate and our nozzle size on a probe adjusted
to collect a set
amount of volume within a certain time and we just targeted
two hours it wasn't
always two hours but we always did get a minimum sample
volume of 60 and actually
we targeted more closer to a hundred sixty is a bare
minimum that you have to
sample so we did achieve that yeah of course where it lists
EPA methods yes are
there other methods that you could use to run those tests
or those the
prescribed methods and you have to use those yeah great
question um for
environmental compliance EPA test methods and these EPA
test methods are
actually part of NSPS they were promulgated in federal code
under NSPS
appendix a of 40 CFR 60 and these test methods are actually
used internationally
I mean Canada has theirs I think they come out under a
different name but
they're effectively the same thing working projects in Asia
we use EPA test
methods from US EPA yeah these are also pretty standard for
the pollutants like
there's different methods like method 20 you could use for
knocks it's very
similar to method 70 but I would say the vast majority of
time you can see method
70 for knocks ammonia we use method 320 you could use
another method called CTM
27 both were accepted in the test protocol we submitted to
the TCEQ we
said we're gonna use method 320 again this accepted method
very common
that's nice are these these methods are they spelled out in
our TCEQ permit which
ones we need to use actually no so as a minor source we the
standard permit that
TCEQ gave us did not explicitly state which test method you
had to use so I
sort of took it upon myself to identify the most common
methods which are here
listed again method 320 could be CTM 27 but both are really
used very commonly
but I will say even though the permit us being a minor
source have having a
standard permit even though it wasn't explicit in it these
test methods would
be very much accepted and we again we didn't receive any
comments back from
TCEQ saying you should not use 70 you have to use method 20
right so we went
forward sorry of course is there any advantage to using one
method over the
other either way for air quality or I mean is there any
advantage either way
for using to me no especially when we talk about 320 and CT
M 27 when I
previously talked about method 20 over 7e I prefer method
70 because 20 if you
read it actually just refers to 70 over and over and over
again I do feel yeah
it's I think your perspective there yes yes yes yeah anyone
else good
thought be a good idea just give you guys a little visual
of the actual
apparatus and the equipment that we we did might not be the
most exciting can
you guys see my mouse up there all right great so this
black line is going to be
our sample line it's connected to the probe that we have
stuck into the duck
work pulling sample gas and is going down into our trailer
which has our
analyzers here is our FTIR the FTIR is used for method 320
measuring ammonia
it's a actually sort of a sense of machine but we one of
our QSTIs was
specialized in analyzers and I'm glad he was around site
because these are
sensitive machines they're very precise and they're great
but they can be a
little sensitive and he was around to make sure it worked
properly so flue gas
comes in from the probe probe in the stack into our FTIR
measures ammonia
then it goes and is split off into a gas conditioning plate
here and also to our
VOC the gas conditioning plate basically just removes
moisture from your sample
gas and we want to remove moisture because water can be an
interference for
the NOx and the CO analyzer so we have to remove the
moisture and then the
flue gas goes through there into our thermo NOx CO analy
zers we don't want
to move water from flue gas for VOC measurements because VO
Cs can be
absorbed by water so if you remove the moisture you could
get false lows of the
actual VOC measurements so here are the the lovely analy
zers that we used
thermos a lead manufacturer you'll see them often around
this right here was to
measure the oxygen concentration that we have used for a
lot of our calculations
pretty much the PM sample train was not done through analy
zers it it never is
just because particulates a solid you have to collect it
you have to analyze
in the laboratory so here's a schematic of what the train
looks like so here's
our nozzle this is the only point of entry of flue gas into
this entire system
before and after the test we we put a stopper into that
nozzle and make sure
that the integrity of that system is is good that there's
no leaks of ambient
air coming into our train to dilute the sample that is the
only source of flue
gas into our train so as flue gas enters our nozzle here it
is a filter through a
filterable particulate matter filter if you see a term FPM
or ever hear the term
of front half when talking about emissions testing that's
what we're
talking about here the front half or filter filterable
particulate matter so
you know commonly like dust rocks what we commonly think of
PM as for testing
though with PM there's filterable and condensable condens
ables are that type
of particulate matter that isn't really apparent at hotter
temperatures but once
you settle down cooler temperatures it condenses out so
here after the filter
we go through a vertical condenser we drop out water is
continuously circulated
through this little thing coin the flue gas temperature
down and then as a flue
gas passes through it CPM or a condensable particulate
matter will form
and then be taken out by this filter here this back half is
actually filled
with ice to further cool the flue gas down to below the dew
point so we collect
all the moisture that's going through the flue gas we want
the moisture to do
another calculation for the molecular weight of the flue
gas the pump here is
really what's pulling all the flue gas through the train so
it goes through
there and the dry gas meter measures how much flue gas we
're collecting this is
also important because we measure the pressure drop across
this peel tube we
have measurements of it we know the K factor refraction
factors across that
peel tube and we could basically do a big calculation to
figure out how much
flue gas we're collecting here's a picture of what we
actually did here's
our PM probe right there here is the probe that black line
that was referring
to in that other schematic that goes all over analyzers it
is attached to a probe
sort of hard to see there that's also stuck in this is not
assembled but this
is the train that I was referring to here's our our little
condenser where
vertical dropout here's a CPM filter and a Pinger's and P
inger's just being a
fancy word for classware yeah here are the meter boxes so
this dry gas meter
that you saw here here's a pump that you saw in the
schematic we tried to do two
engines at a time per engine hall there's a North Hall and
South Hall so
we're trying to do four at a time so we just had an
operator here looking at all
of the measurements and join them down to make sure we're
on track to collect
our full sample that we need after we're done with the PM
sample train we
actually wash the inside of the probe to make sure that any
filter will
particular matter that sort of attached itself inside the
probe is good gets
collected we want to collect all the PM that isn't in the
flue gas we also wash
all of the impinges as well and so these bottles that you
see here have the
washes from all of our samples well a portion of our
samples and these here
these little black things are actually are filterable PM
filters they look
dirty but um from my previous experiences with other rice
engines as
well as with air hygiene engines that's not not actually PM
that's on the on
those basically the temperature of the flue gas from the
rice is so hot and if
you ever get out to site and then feel it it's hot that the
the filter itself
starts to char it's not burning burning you're not gonna
see any flames but yeah
there's a charring effect that you see on the filter
surface just due to
temperature these filters are weighed in a laboratory
before we do testing and
after we do testing their weight again and sure enough
there was no
appreciable matter on these FPM filters so it's actually
just a charring effect
and now the moment of truth huh okay so on the left hand
side there's the engines
on the top hence top across the columns those are the
pollutants that we tested
in parentheses are our permit limits so you'll see 1.33
pounds per hour is what
the permit had for NOx VOC is 2.07 ammonia PM 3.17 etc the
values that you
see are the average of three tests so for each pollutant on
each engine we did
three tests you know one test it's by itself could be a
false low or false I
should say false low it could be higher or lower than what
's indicative of the
average right so you always want to do three tests confirm
and get a more of a
sturdy answer so as you can see the average of the three
tests for each
pollutant on each engine is below what the permit had us
limited to yes yes at
times very significantly below there's one number I would
like to talk about
but I just want to give you guys a few seconds to look at
the table because I I
know that's a lot of numbers there are you gonna talk you
're my maybe gonna
attack the PM numbers yes 2.23 yeah that's a I mean next
slide okay okay any
others that you guys would like me to talk about well I
have a just a strange
procedural question sure it seems like we spent a long time
not publishing the
contract limits and there they write are no these aren't
the contract don't
there's the same as work civil contract limits right there
oh yeah I had
actually not seen the contract we were never given it but I
was told that the
contract limits were used for a permit so they are
effectively are the same
okay but that goes back to yeah okay all right so do you
want my question on the
PM or you just gonna cover it because isn't that normal
that you're gonna have
oils and other things in the construction oh okay all right
that's what you're
gonna say no you're a mind reader um so as you can see from
the previous slide
all of these values are around one or below and here we
have 2.23 which is
double or triple what the other engines were testing yet so
when we were when
we were doing the tests the first run on PM on engine one
the backwash the washes
on the the back end it was dirty I was looking at it and it
was just dirty
compared to the other tests that we had a collect at the
time it was clearly
something I'd accumulated in that engine when we ran test
two and test three that
day and we got those results back they look clear just like
all the other
engines had now in my experience whether you're talking
about combustion turbines
or rises you try to circumvent it by having the engines run
for a certain
amount of time but it's common that residual grease is like
literally from
construction workers gloves or act the actual lubricants
that are intentionally
placed inside the equipment those need to burn off and you
try to run the
engines or the turbines for a certain amount of time to
burn all of that off
before you do your emissions testing but here I would con
jecture that it would
had not been done because run one was dirty runs two and
three were were
incredibly clean very clean I don't remember the exact
numbers but they were
below one pounds per hour where you average them yes
average one burnt it
all off the other two were clean yes yeah so that is the
ultimate result
engine one passed on p.m. but the value looks higher
compared to the rest
because of one one engine one seems like an outlier
compared to all the other
data sets we have just one engine there was another engine
that was slightly
higher yeah not above yeah yeah but probably the same
explanation yeah yeah
but still that's significantly below the permit levels yes
throughout the testing
it should also point out that we do continuous QA so all
that those
analyzers I was showing you earlier we would bring we had
on site calibrated
gas concentrations that were past EPA test protocols so you
know I don't
remember the exact concentrations but say we have a gas
bottle of 10 ppm of
knocks we have run into our analyzer that analyzer has to
read very close to 10
ppm of knocks otherwise that entire test fails we have to
fix our analyzer and go
through our test again we did not have that problem all
those analyzers came to
site prepared they were good all the QA checks passed the p
.m. trains again the
post and pre leak checks they passed so the integrity of
that sample train was
good so all the QA tests passed and they are in our test
report here is a copy
this is George Morrill's test report as you can see it's it
's quite thick it's
been submitted to TCEQ and it will be viewable by the
public once TCEQ gets
reviews it and incorporate it into the website if I had to
say one statement a
very blanket statement generally about the testing it's
this all emissions test
results passed thinking ahead if you're wondering about how
these test results
compared to other projects have been a part of they do
compare very favorably
compared to like coal fire power plants or even combustion
turbines the results
are low and that's to be expected because as you guys know
you guys have a
the South Coast special SCR so yeah these did test very
well and gave a very
comparably to other sources so that I'll hand back over to
George what is he
just one question for ego yeah of course what's okay this
is the initial test
yes we send for the permit so what's the ongoing testing
schedule or is that
yeah is that part of your contract to do as part of your
well to dance with that
part of the question no that's not part of a contract we'd
be more and help you
to help out in the future that's the right now that it's
not but then did
your further question of what it is what is the testing
requirements going right
I don't have a clear answer to that for you right now other
engine facilities
that I've worked on they were major sources so they had
more of an explicit
and longer test or air permit and so other projects for
example had to test
every third engine every three years without without
letting a period of five
years I believe between one engine being tested so there's
some nuances to it
but basically that permit did not require annual testing on
each engine
and that's that facility and each facility is gonna be
different so what
it means for dent energy center with being a minor source
and being the state
of Texas as well as opposed to you know Oregon Ohio Florida
I don't know that
specific answer but um I do have my play to try to find
exactly what that is yeah
I didn't know if there was a constant monitoring air
quality monitor part of
our deal yeah for our permit for this being a minor source
no that was not
required okay any other questions
you might have seen Jason Brown our plant manager he
indicates that he
recalls our testing requirements to be every three years or
16,000 hours
whichever is less but likely we're gonna do something
sooner than that just to
kind of validate everything but so we've got some time and
I just wanted to say I
was impressed with the results and the quality of the work
that was done you
were forecasting in the budget that we brought to you
depending what year it
was somewhere between 2,300 and 2,800 hours per year 2,800
I think was the FY
19 and that sort of went down after that as we believe the
market prices would
drop over time and that's going to be significantly less
than the permit
levels the 2,800 plant hours we have a hundred tons of
either NOx VOC and
carbon monoxide and we're gonna be down well under that
with the 2,800 hours so
looks like we're not going to be constrained by the permit
emissions
levels will be constrained by you know what does the market
bear for for
operation of the unit as was indicated by Paul you know
there's this very
enhanced emission control system that was optional South
Coast air quality
management district grade and and it did work and reduce
emissions so it averaged
the plant you know we look at NOx as one of the main
precursors of ozone and it
averaged 0.426 pounds per hour over all the units and that
was well under 1.33
pounds which is what our target was so so everything's
looking good and you know
this is part of our program to bring renewable energy up to
the hundred
percent level for Denton while we don't we're not required
as we've talked about
in the past having a fast start unit as part of our
portfolio it is gonna
provide some value to us as you know we go back just a bit
here you know as our
renewables don't operate we saw a day a couple of weeks ago
that I I made a
presentation before APPA and I made a picture of the of
what happened that day
prices went up as high as three thousand dollars of megaw
att hour and typically
we're looking at maybe thirty dollars or forty dollars and
we looked at the
output of our wind project out in West Texas during those
same three or four
hours it had gone from 150 megawatts which is our contract
maximum down to
basically zero for three or four hours and that caused the
market prices to go
crazy and we would we had to pay that price for our load
because we buy all of
our load from the market and if we didn't have something
that we could kick
on to help recover that three thousand dollars then you
know we would you know
we would be upside down in the market so the deck while it
's not required for
reliability because that's air cards job and there's other
machines left out
there that can do that most of the time it's really makes
sense to us as a
financial hedge and I think you've heard us say that in the
past and we'll we'll
we'll back up our renewables with that so all is good and
happy we could bring
you that information so there's get you back on schedule
yeah you did good
any any questions of George question to come I had the
opportunity to go see the
plant on June 16th and it's impressive it's yeah it took me
through it yeah it
was a great tour I really enjoyed it so good job you know
we've got a great
staff out there yeah I'm totally amazed and the
construction went well Chris
Lutrik couldn't be here tonight he's having a little health
issue but you
know Chris was on top of this thing you know working with
our contractors so
thank you I'm glad you enjoyed it okay thank you George
okay the next item we
have actually a little bit of agenda shuffle here we're
gonna move the closed
meeting to the end of the meeting that's okay there's no
action item required on
the closed meeting item so we can just go through the rest
of the agenda and
then we'll wrap up with that after we do that so that going
into the regular
meeting items for individual consideration we have the
draft minutes
of the June 18th 2018 public utility board published in
advance are there any
comments questions concerns on the minutes I had made the
comment about the
recycling materials and I just want to clarify that I it
was a little bit about
what Ron or whoever was saying that because China is not
taking a lot of the
recyclables they've gone from the 95% to 99% is that
impacting us that's really
my question is that going to impact us and our recycling
plants so I don't want
to stop recycling or anything like that sure okay
is there a motion then to accept the minutes or approve the
minutes as
submitted in a second any discussion all in favor say aye
aye any opposed thank
you item B is to consider recommending adoption of an
ordinance of the city of
Denton Texas authorizing the city manager or
designee to execute a transmission line relocation
agreement with Toronto Real
to Inc a Texas corporation the John Oh partners Ltd a Texas
limited partnership
and NW realty a Texas corporation for the relocation of 138
KV transmission
line owned by the Texas Municipal Power Agency and
maintained by the city
located on the near west side of East loop 288 south of Sh
ady Oaks Drive and
Brent Heath is here to talk about this relocation project
one of the owners in
town asked us to relocate this project TMPA the owner of
the line as you
indicated was found that to be acceptable particularly
since the owner
of the property was going to pay the price for that so we
've got two items
here we just wanted to brief you on the relocation itself
and then the next
item under your agenda we'll ask you to approve the
purchase of the polls so
that we can meet a timeline that the developers asked us to
meet so Brent do
you want to do a overview of this for thank you George good
evening George
kind of keep the teed all this up so I'll go quickly
through here this is a
transmission line relocation it is a 138 KV line that's
owned by TMPA that's
Texas Municipal Power Agency the property owner that this
transmission
line resides on and exist on he's asked us to relocate a
portion of that to a
different location that's on the exact same property he has
he does have quite
a bit of land in this area so we were able to work with him
on that he we had
purchased a piece of property from the same landowner in
the past and at that
time he put a portion of those proceeds that we purchased
the land with which
accounted to 2.2 million dollars into escrow and that is
being held here in
Denton at reunion title and it was intended to pay for this
relocation of
the transmission line to give you a map of where we're
talking about this is the
East Loop 288 this right here is tractor supply you can see
the water treatment
plan over here in the bottom left hand corner the black
portion of the line
that's parallel to East Loop 288 is the portion that he is
asked to be relocated
and he wishes to have that relocated to of course it has to
tie at the same
points so he wishes basically for this black line to swing
over to this red
line location it's essentially the same distance it's it's
slightly a little bit
longer will require 13 poles 0.6 miles.
Being a Texas Municipal Power Agency line City of Denton is
the TOP
transmission operator for the TMPA assets here in Denton
County so we went
to the TMPA board of directors in March of 2017 they gave
the City of Denton
authorization to relocate that at the expense of the
property owner the
transmission line agreement that is in front of you tonight
will fund the
relocation at the actual cost of the construction not to
exceed the escrowed
amount. For that after the lines relocated there will be a
portion of the
overhead rights that are no longer needed where the old
line was at the
city will retain the public utility easement for
underground rights for an
existing water and sanitary sewer line. We wanted to
confirm that the 2.2
million dollars how does that sit today is compared to
years ago when we started
talking about this we were kind of concerned about the
polls being still
with the metals prices changing rapidly here in the United
States and so we went
out for a bid in May and RFP that we'll talk about next
down here this agenda
item that will be the next item it came back in a little
higher than we
originally anticipated but the bottom line is we still feel
very confident we
can relocate this line under the 2.2 million dollars that's
escrowed.
The benefits to the line relocation besides meeting the
desire from the
property owner is for the city of Denton it does provide
easier physical access
for our crews to operate and maintain the line along a city
street it does give
new poles gives new conductors it improves the system
capacity performance
and reliability. So the city of Denton after we've reviewed
the agreement work
through legal with it work with the property owner we
recommend accepting
the property owners 2.2 million dollars that he's holding
an escrow for us to
take. So with that I'd be happy to answer any questions
that you have.
Questions? Do you mind putting the map back up please?
Certainly. So everything in
the red line when if I recall when the property acquisition
for the substation
was made did that include the easement cost? Yes sir it did
. That's already acquired. So that's
already done. That is correct. Just swing it up. Perfect.
Okay. Plus it opens up a hopefully it's gonna open up a
great commercially
developable portion of loop 88 which is you know by moving
that line back off
the loop that's good. That is the desire of the property
owner. Yes. Good. Any other
questions? No. Is there a motion then on item B? Move
approval. Is there a second?
I have a motion a second. Any discussion? All in favor say
aye. Any opposed? Same
sign. Okay. Item C. I'm assuming Branch are gonna do that
one also. Yes sir that is
correct. This would be the Galvanized steel
poles that we went out for an RFP in May to confirm what is
the current price and
we did have the previous multi-year steel pole contract
expired a few months
before this and so we felt like we needed to get a new
price to see where
at. This is the same map I just showed you of where these
poles will be used at.
It's only the 16 poles required for this whole project. 13
of them will be funded
by the property owner for the portion that he's requesting
to be relocated. RFP
request for proposal 6744 is only to relocate the section
shown in red. This
was a relocation that the property owner asked us to move.
As I mentioned 16 poles
are required for the whole project and 13 of them will be
directly related to
the project that he's requested us to move. This is the way
that the pricing
broke down on the specific poles. The top portion is the 13
poles that will be
used in the red line that you saw. It totals 845,000 which
was the eight
exact same number we used in the table I showed you on the
previous agenda item
and these would be the other three poles that gets us from
industrial sub up to
the brinker site so we can physically tie that together. To
give you a picture of
what the transmission poles look like because it is around
a curve on shady
oaks there will have to be some angled structures that will
have to come with
some double dead-end poles and then there also are some
tangent poles. Both
of these designs are able to have alternate circuits in the
future come
off the backside whenever that need is determined and that
is what exists right
now with the existing TNPA line so we preserve that right.
So based on the
evaluation from the evaluation team the Texas Electric
Cooperative TEC a
proposal it was the highest evaluated score it was the
quickest delivery and
it also was the lowest price and so staff recommends
approval of the Texas
Electric Cooperative purchase for the steel Gavin I suppose
not to exceed the
full amount of 1.1 million. Be happy to answer any
questions.
Can't beat it when it's the best score the lowest price and
quickest delivery.
It's hard to believe. I know the overall score came out
higher but the one that
kind of stands out I mean is probable performance and it
got 12 out of 15
instead of 15 out of 15 so I guess what's we haven't
actually used some
still poles from Texas Electric Cooperative the previous
pole
manufacturer we had used them before so that's how some of
those scores
differentiated but they did get a total 96 out of 100
points to ECW. Right.
Okay.
All right any other questions? Is there a motion on item C?
Second? Second. Any
discussion? All in favor say aye. Any opposed? Same sign.
Thank you. Thank you.
Yes. Okay item D is to consider recommending adoption of an
ordinance of
the City of Denton Texas Texas Home Rule Municipal
Corporation providing for
authorizing and approving the purchase of property, boiler,
and machinery in
business interruption insurance coverage for the City of
Denton through the city
sole broker of record McGriff, Siebels, and Williams of
Texas Incorporated with
a three-year not to exceed amount of 1 million 399 thousand
dollars. Good evening
Chairman, members of the PUV. My name is Scott Payne, I'm
the risk manager of the City of
Denton and the item before you is what you just said the
approval of property
insurance, boiler machinery, or equipment breakdown
coverage, and business
interruption for the Denton Energy Center of the DEC. So
obviously with
construction nearly completed it was important for us to
get property
insurance to protect this asset once it was online.
Unfortunately our current
property carrier that we have for all the other city
facilities affiliated FM
doesn't write coverage for power generation facilities so
it necessitated
us going out to the market to do this on a kind of
standalone basis. So we banded
February with McGriff who's our sole broker gathering the
information for the
underwriters on the DEC. A lot of information exchanging
hands back and
forth. Those of you guys who don't know much about the
property market in Texas
it's starting to shrink quite a bit from a commercial
standpoint mostly due to
all the wind and hail losses that Texas has had so that
makes the market a little
bit smaller. When you add in those who write public sector
because typically a
lot of our values are in one geographical location we don't
have it
spread all over the country that makes it even smaller and
then when you get to a
power generation facility it gets even smaller than that.
So we did find six
companies that were interested we conducted a tour and an
information
gathering session back on May the 10th. We had a lot of
good interest a lot of
things I didn't understand that was being talked out
between Jason and the
engineers out there but they all seemed to understand it
and that was good. Our
goal was to have the coverage in place by July 1st when we
would have reached
substantial completion and take it on from an operational
standpoint. Unfortunately
on May the 24th we were advised from the Dex Journal
contractor that what we
thought was still being covered was no longer being covered
and that was the
property component of the builders risk. Once it moved into
the operational
testing phase although they had told us it was still going
to be covered it was
no longer covered and so we had to scramble to put some
property coverage in
place at that point in time. So fortunately McGriff was
already working
quite diligently on placing the coverage and so a lot of
conversations already
been taking place. Most of the information was already in
the hands of
the underwriter and so they basically just expedited the
process by a couple
of weeks to get the coverage in place by the 25th. So there
was one rather
sleepless night on the 24th hoping that no storms blew
through the area but again
we managed to get the coverage in place without any issue
at the deck. The three
main components that are covered in this property this
insurance procurement is
the property which is your traditional hail, windstorm,
tornado, fire, vandalism
type coverage. There's also which in this situation a big
piece of is the
boiler machinery or the equipment breakdown because
obviously the biggest
piece of the value is those engines that are on site and so
we want to make sure we
have coverage for that and the last piece is a business
interruption coverage so
that if the facility is damaged and unoperable because of a
covered loss
there is some replacement for the revenue that we'd be
losing because of
that piece of it. So we were able to get four proposals for
this the one that we
recommended tonight is the one from Lexington and Swiss Re
it's a combo
proposal where each company shares 50% of the premium and
also 50% of any loss
that happens and it does include all three of the coverage
that we identified
before. Lloyds of London presented a quote that did not
include the boiler
machinery and then Travelers and HSB gave us boiler
machinery quotes only so
really the only one that met all of our needs was with Lex
ington Swiss Re
proposal. Again like I mentioned before it's a split
proposal between the two
companies only one that concluded all the elements and the
premium as you saw
is about $444,000 per year and it covers about 170 million
dollars in
total insured valuable on the project including the new
substation that's
there on site as well. So we're seeking approval from the P
UB and from the
council tomorrow to procure that insurance retroactively
back to May the
25th and I'll be glad to answer any questions. Questions?
So we had a
gentleman's agreement on the insurance from construction to
testing? No it was
part of the construction documents that the builders risk
would cover the
actual property itself during the construction and they had
given us
assurances that it would be covered under their builders
risk policy up
until July the 1st and then I guess they went back and had
their insurance
experts really look at what the document said and then we
were biased and no that
was not the case. Well all the liability coverages the
workers comp and everything
was certainly in place the actual coverage on the facility
itself was no
longer in existence. So their their definition of
operational became once
you could test it? Right. It was the only thing that was
under construction at that point.
Yeah. Which was not what we initially had understood. Well
I'm glad you're able to
scramble and get coverage and glad nothing happened on the
24th. Me too. Me too.
And it is very difficult like you say in this market at my
last employer we
sometimes had to get two different insurance so we could
get boiler and
machinery and they wouldn't cover it all and Lloyd's of
London was the one that
covered actually I believe the boiler machinery so why they
said not here. We
must have some claims I guess. Well that was a good thing
about this being a brand new
facility is that there was more interest in it because it
wasn't a 30 year old
platter. I think it was nice and pretty and shiny and had
warranties on some
things and so that did elicit some more interest from some
companies that may
not have been and you know we think maybe going into next
year as we have
better data on the business interruption because we've
actually been in operation
for a year we may be able to get those rates massage a
little bit and maybe
come down who knows it's the insurance market in Texas no
one knows for sure.
Was that a good rate? It was really our only rate. Right I
mean it was still a
good rate you know had we done a layer program with its
quotes that were out there
it would have been taking the Lloyd's of London property
coverage and then all the
one of the others for the boiler machinery which have been
more expensive
than the than the Swiss re Lexington proposal so you know
it's it's more
expensive than what we're paying for the other property
exposures the city has
was also a very specialized risk and a lot of value sitting
in one location so
that makes the underwriters quite nervous. But I remember
Jason you said
sorry can you still the lights not going you said that the
building will sustain
what level of wind? 125. I think all those things helped
become a more
attractive risk for the end of riders because again new
construction top of
line construction on and on.
All right questions Scott is there a motion? I'll move
approval. Second. You have a
motion and a second discussion all in favor say aye. Aye.
Any opposed same sign.
Okay motion passes. Okay thank you Scott. Item E is ACM
update. Mr. Chairman
members of the board for the benefit of you and everybody
in the audience I have
nothing to report. Thank you. That is a great benefit. Okay
concluding items under
section 551.042 of the Texas Open Meetings Act is to
respond to inquiries
from the public utilities board or the public with specific
factual information
or rest station policy or accept a proposal to place the
matter on the
agenda for an upcoming meeting.
Nothing to propose. Okay then the only thing we have left
is the closed meeting
which we will actually will there's no action item
associated with that so I
guess we take a motion to adjourn this meeting and go into
closed meeting and
that'll be the final adjournment once we finish that closed
meeting. That's always
your job Brandon. I move we adjourn the open meeting. Okay
we have a motion and
second to do so all in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed same
sign.