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BCC Minutes 12/20/2000 W (Solid Waste)December 20, 2000 TRANSCRIPT OF THE LANDFILL MEETING OF THE BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS Naples, Florida, December 20, 2000 LET IT BE REMEMBERED, that the Board of County Commissioners, in and for the County of Collier, and also acting as the Board of Zoning Appeals and as the governing board(s) of such special districts as have been created according to law and having conducted business herein, met on this date at 1:00 p.m. in WORKSHOP SESSION at the Naples Landfill, Naples, Florida, with the following members present: CHAIRMAN: ALSO PRESENT: James D. Carter, Ph.D. Jim Coletta Donna Fiala Tom Henning Pamela Mac'Kie Tom Olliff, County Manager David Weigel, County Attorney Page1 COLLAR COUNTY BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS AGENDA WORKSHOP % TO BE HELD AT THE NAPLES LANDFILL 3901 WHITELAKE BLVD.~ .NAPLES ~ FLORIDA Wednesday, Deeember 20, 2000 1:00 pm NOTICE: ALL PERSONS WISHING TO SPEAK ON ANY AGENDA ITEM MUST REGISTER PRIOR TO SPEAKING. SPEAKERS MUST REGISTER WITH THE COUNTY MANAGER PRIOR TO THE PRESENTATION OF THE AGENDA ITEM TO BE ADDRESSED. COLLIER COUNTY ORDINANCE NO. 99-22 REQUIRES THAT ALL LOBBYISTS SHALL, BEFORE ENGAGING IN ANY LOBBYING ACTMTIES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, ADDRESSING THE BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS), REGISTER WITH THE CLERK TO THE BOARD AT THE BOARD MINUTES AND REC. ORDS DEPARTMENT. REQUESTS TO ADDRESS THE BOARD ON SUILIECTS WHICH ARE NOT ON THIS AGENDA MUST BE SUBMITTED IN WRITING WITH EXPLANATION TO THE COUNTY MANAGER AT LEAST 13 DAYS PRIOR TO THE DATE OF THE MEETING AND WILL BE HEARD UNDER "PUBLIC PETITIONS" AT THE NEXT REGULARLY SCHEDULED BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS' MEETING, JANUARY 9, 2001. ANY PERSON WHO DECIDES TO APPEAL A DECISION OF THIS BOARD WILL NEED A RECORD OF THE PROCEEDINGS PERTAINING THERETO, AND THEREFORE MAY NEED TO ENSURE THAT A VERBATIM RECORD OF THE PROCEEDINGS IS MADE, WHICH RECORD INCLUDES THE TESTIMONY AND EVIDENCE UPON WHICH THE APPEAL IS TO BE BASED. ALL REGISTERED PUBLIC SPEAKERS WILL BE LIMITED TO FIVE (5) MINUTES UNLESS PERMISSION FOR ADDITIONAL TIME IS GRANTED BY THE CHAIRMAN. IF YOU ARE A PERSON WITH A DISABILITY WHO NEEDS ANY ACCOMMODATION IN ORDER TO PARTICIPATE IN THIS PROCEEDING, YOU ARE ENTITLED, AT NO COST TO YOU, TO THE PROVISION OF CERTAIN ASSISTANCE. PLEASE CONTACT THE COLLIER COUNTY FACILITIES MANAGEMENT DEPARTMENT LOCATED AT 3301 EAST TAMIAMI TRAIL, NAPLES, FLORIDA, 34112, (941) 774-8380. 1. PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE 2. DISCUSSION REGARDING SOLID WASTE DISPOSAL A. Present and future solid waste disposal needs in Collier County. B. Public Comments. C. Productivity Committee Comments. D. BCC discussions. 3. ADJOURN 1 December 20, 2000 December 20, 2000 Item #2A PRESENT AND FUTURE SOLID WASTE DISPOSAL NEEDS IN COLLIER COUNTY CHAIRMAN CARTER: Are we alive and well? Yes. All right, any of you that have comments or want to speak at this workshop this afternoon, if you would go to the back table, there are sign-up slips. You will do that and hand them to our county manager, Tom Olliff. And at the end of the workshop, we will take public comments. This is really a gavel, folks. I'd like to call to order this workshop for the Board of County Commissioners on the discussion of our current and future solid waste disposal needs. If you'd all rise with me as we say the pledge of allegiance to the flag. (Pledge of Allegiance was recited in unison). CHAIRMAN CARTER: The format of the workshop this afternoon will be presentations by staff. And we have some other -- and they have some other people who are here to share information with us. And we will proceed in that direction. At this time, Mr. Olliff, I'll turn it over to you and you can guide and direct us in this activity. MR. OLLIFF: Okay, Mr. Chairman, I want to just thank everyone for putting up with the cold weather and joining us here on top of the hill. We hope that while you're here that you'll take the time to actually look around and see the operation of the landfill. And if you have any questions at all, the man standing up there with the black jacket with the big white stripe on it will be happy to point anything out that's of question or interest to you. That's Mr. Mudd. And Mr. Chairman, I'm going to turn over the presentation to Jim Mudd. MR. MUDD: Mr. Chairman, commissioners, what a wonderful day, CHAIRMAN CARTER: Fantastic. Beautiful. MR. MUDD: One of the last fall days we're going to have this year, I think. Today we're here to talk about the future prospects for solid Page 2 December 20, 2000 waste disposal for Collier County. This is the first workshop you're going to have in a six-month agenda of workshops with the county staff. This is an important issue, and it's been one that has basically been part of county business for a long time. And a little bit of history. I've provided in your read-ahead a chronology of all the things that have transpired since 1985. But to be brief, in December of '85, a waste to energy plant was thought about and a bond was issued for 88 million dollars. By the end of 1990, waste to energy plant had died as an alternative for solid waste disposal and the bond was paid off. In 1993, there was talk by a consultant for the county to expand the landfill to the north by 325 acres, and the county went out and purchased that land and still owns it. And there's about three parcels that don't belong to us. It's a patchwork that's out there and at issue. And it's still there. It was a decision that was made that that was no longer an option. And that died. And the land was declared surplus. There was also -- during that time period, there was an examination of several high-tech solutions to solid waste disposal in Collier County. And then on March 24th, 1998, the staff presented to the Commission a presentation to talk about waste disposal services. One of the options was exporting waste; the second was a new landfill site; and then there was a big discussion on landfill loaders. At the end of that presentation, the pursuit of Site L as a new landfill site officially died. And here we are today. And we're going to talk about a lot of those same issues that we've talked about in this county from as early as 1985. One of the things that are different, the county staff decided to get an independent technical consultant, Malcolm Pirnie, to help them with the solid waste issues, and Malcolm Pirnie has been in our services since May of this year, has helped us with several issues, as far as the landfill is concerned -- and I've provided some of the information -- their independent technical review of the odor situation that we have on the landfill in your read-ahead packet. Another thing we need to talk about for this public information meeting is the notification of the public. In the middle of November, Commissioner Henning and the interest Page 3 December 20, 2000 group from Golden Gate met together and we talked about the monitoring plan in the Golden Gate Community Center. At that time we talked about a December 20th workshop meeting. Ms. Kathy Zollo, from the Naples News, covered that story and the workshop date in the local news section of the paper that -- the following morning. On December 4th we put out the first press release of the workshop. On December 14th we sent out a second press release. December 19th we sent out the third one. There were 250 fliers that were distributed on December 15th to the Golden Gate area. Channel 54, for the last two weeks, has shown -- they advertised this workshop about every eight minutes. The productivity has been involved in this in three different meetings that's we've had with them. And the Golden Gate citizens group has been part of the process as far as the early notification in November. We tried to get the information out to the public about this workshop the best way we know how. And I'm glad today we have the turnout that we have. We're also going to talk -- as part of this process, we're just going to talk about the issues today and lay them out in everything we collected so far. Malcolm Pirnie, we've asked them to put the presentation on with their best minds that they have to put through a very comprehensive solid waste presentation to talk about all the issues that are upon us and to give you some alternatives for further discussion. As soon as that presentation is over, the agenda calls for public comment. Mr. Olliff has been receiving those statements from the public that would like to speak. After that is complete, Mr. Carl Otto, the vice chair of the productivity committee, has a statement that he would like to present, and then it's a discussion, open discussion, with the commissioners to ask any questions of anybody here that's present. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Thank you. Sounds like a plan to me. MR. MUDD: Sir, I'll be followed by Mr. Steve Schwarz, the Malcolm Pirnie consultant. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Thank you. MR. SCHWARZ: Mr. Chairman, members of the commission, it's my honor to be here today. I must say, I've done this kind of consulting for many, many years, I've never worked for a commission that had the courage to do a meeting like this at Page 4 December 20, 2000 landfill, so my admiration. CHAIRMAN CARTER: It's because we have a very creative staff, sir. MR. SCHWARZ: I see. One of the drawbacks, though, is that our audio visual is not quite as good as it would be if we were in the commission building. What we have is we have some boards which we've positioned so that you can sort of see them and the audience can sort of see them. And we also have paper copies, which I think you each have a copy of. So I'll try to cue you into these as I go along so you'll know what I'm referring to. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Thank you. MR. SCHWARZ: Okay, the first overhead I'm referring to is -- it's a graph of the solid waste generation in Collier County, today and for the next 10 years or so. What it depicts is the inexorable march of solid waste. Up and up every year. And that's a good thing. That says that Collier County is growing in terms of population, and it also says that the economy is good in Collier County, because waste generation is an adjunct to economic activity. But even though that's a good thing, of course it's also a problem, because something has to be done with all of this stuff. And in a place like Florida, it has to be done pretty quickly before it turns into a public health crisis. And right now here in Collier County, you have a pretty tough situation; one of the toughest we've seen in many places that we've worked. Collier County in essence depends on Cell 6 of this landfill, which is over to my right. And our estimates, and Waste Management agrees pretty closely, say that Cell 6 has something less than three years to go before it's full. Considering -- and we'll talk more about this as we go along. But considering the length of time it would take to implement alternatives, build something new, get permits and so on, three years is a frighteningly short time to have. And it's even actually worse than that because your Growth Management Plan calls for you to have two years of reserve. So you have like actually less than one year before you're down to your two years of reserve. So this is indeed an urgent problem. What we're going to do today is we're going to review the Page 5 December 20, 2000 situation, we're going to review a number of options, and we're going to give you the pros and cons and the costs of all of those options, and we're going to -- in the end we're going to give you a set of recommendations, a comprehensive set of recommendations, immediate steps, some steps that we can do in the intermediate phase, but also long-term recommendations that will solve this problem for the next 50 years and beyond. Let me say two things about those recommendations: First, they're going to cost a lot more than what Collier County does now. There are choices and relative costs, but it really doesn't matter what option you choose, because any option is going to cost a lot more than what you do now. And it has to. It has to because as we'll show you later, what Collier County is spending now is really not up to the standard of what people in Florida spend to handle solid waste. And it has to because what you're spending now is not producing a solution. The second thing I'll say about those recommendations is that although we feel very keenly our professional responsibility to make recommendations to you, these are very tough recommendations. There are big policy questions here. It's not a simple case of us looking at three choices and saying they all work, the least expensive one is here, we recommend that. It's not like that. And you'll see the choices are much tougher. So although we'll give you our recommendations, we'll also show you all the choices and the pros and cons of those choices, and in the end it's for you to guide us in the direction that you want to go. Okay, as I said, because of the extremely tight time frame here, we have to make two groups of recommendations, at least. We've got to do something in the short-term. And most of the things we would normally consider, you know, just aren't going to work fast enough for the short-term. So what could we -- what could we do in the short-term? We've considered conceptually four kinds of choices. One choice is to do something in combination with Lee County. Our first assignment here, actually, back in June was to analyze a joint Lee/Collier County proposal. Of course Lee County has an existing waste management plan. We could take steps to extend the life of this landfill. We could -- you know, in the most conceptual terms, we could build something, perhaps, to give us Page 6 December 20, 2000 more time. Or we could haul out of county. I think those are the -- that's the whole range of possibilities. But as we'll discuss a little further, actually most of these options don't work. The Lee County option, although it seems like a promising idea, is just not going to -- is not going to work. And I leave aside the political issues. That's a whole other kind of reason it might not work. But just on technical grounds, the Lee County facility's already full. They are going to expand it, we think, but that will take time. But even when they expand it, as you'll see in more detail in a few minutes, given the way Collier's growing and Lee is growing, even in an expanded facility, you'll barely have enough room. COMMISSIONER HENNING: basis or long-term basis? MR. SCHWARZ: Either way. And that's on the short-term It can't -- on the short-term basis, because they're full right now and just beginning to think about an expansion, even if they were to start tomorrow we couldn't get it up and running fast enough. But even on the long-term basis, as you'll see, I'll go into more detail in a moment, it just isn't big enough, even if we get it expanded. Similarly, extending the life of this landfill is not a short-term option. You need to get permits for that. And as you know, you're under a consent order right now because of the odor problems. You know, could you possibly get permits and actually do the construction, get it in operation within the less than a year you have now before you're into two years? No. Could you possibly do it in the three years that you have before this landfill is full? Maybe. But I wouldn't count on it. And -- COMMISSIONER HENNING: How do we get out of this point? CHAIRMAN CARTER: Well, we need to let him finish his presentation. I can tell you how we got here. We didn't do what we needed to do. But let's -- that's history. So we need to -- COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Are we supposed to save our questions. Commissioner? CHAIRMAN CARTER: Yeah, I think we really should save those. Let him develop for us so that we can explore those options at the end of his presentation. So I think that will be helpful. MR. SCHWARZ: Right. Okay. So again, possibly an expansion could be done, but because this is all, you know, Page 7 December 20, 2000 urgent public health issue, you just can't count it. It's too easy for it to be delayed beyond that point. Similarly, building something frankly is out of the question. You'd have to find a new site, we'd have to get it permitted, we'd have to finance it, we'd have to actually construct it. There's no way that we can get that in the three years that are available. And that brings us really to the last alternative, which, frankly, in the short-term we think is something that you're going to have to do, which is haul at least a portion of the waste out of Collier County. Let me turn for a minute back to Lee County, just to take a careful look at that. That's the rather complicated graph here. Can I go over to that without losing the microphone? Can I take this? Because Lee County is such a promising idea and because it comes up again and again, I want to spend a little bit of time on that and show you why, kind of surprisingly, it just doesn't work. The lower band there, the lower green band, is 1,200 tons a day, which is the existing capacity of the Lee County facility. The next sort of darker green band that says 1,950, that's the expansion that Lee County is contemplating right now. Right now Lee County has two 600-ton a day lines. We were actually involved in the genesis of that facility. And when we did that, we left a space for a third line, and Lee County is thinking about putting a 750-ton a day line in there. So that would total 1,950. And the top is 2,700. That would contemplate that they would add yet a fourth line at 750. There's some indication that Lee county would be willing to consider that big expansion. It's a staff white paper, not a really -- a commission policy statement. But at least they were willing to talk about that option. So we considered 2,700. And that's a big facility. That would be up there among the biggest facilities in the United States at that size. We considered that as kind of the what we were shooting for. Now, if you look at the angled dotted lines, the lowest line is Lee alone. Lee is a joint project with Hendry, so you have to count them together. That's the second line. You can see where they cross that vertical today, that shows you how the combined tonnage is just now exceeding the capacity of the facility right Page 8 December 20, 2000 now. So they're out of capacity right now. As you can see, if they add a 750 line, just counting Lee and Hendry alone, that pushes their time frame out for another 10 or 15 years. But when you add all three counties together, that's the top most line, Collier, Lee and Hendry, even with the 2,700-ton a day expansion, the three of them out of space at about 2004, roughly three years from today. It's not even worth doing this for three years' time. Now, could possibly the Lee County facility be expanded even further? Possibly. But there's a practical limit of about 3,000 tons a day on these plants, because that's the limit in certain federal regulations. It just doesn't work. It just isn't enough there. I mean, you know, the county is to be congratulated on its growth and its size, but the reality is, it's not enough capacity. So the Lee County -- now, possibly as a -- what we call a merchant tonnage; in other words, there may be a time in three or four years if Lee County expands, when you want to send a relatively few tons to Lee County just because, you know, at this moment you want to send it there, that could work. But in terms of the long-term contractual commitment to send most of all your waste there, it just doesn't have the capacity. Okay, so if we think back to the four alternatives, we've now eliminated -- these are the four alternatives that address short term. We've now really effectively eliminated three of the four. We're down now to out of the county. Before I turn to that, though, I want to say something about the Naples landfill. The issue would be then as we turn to out of county do we want to send everything out of county or do we want to divert a part of the waste to lengthen the lifetime of the Naples landfill? And that's a hard question. There's issues at this landfill, as we all know, but the things that you have to think about when you contemplate that question are cost, of course. You know, it will be more expensive to send stuff out of county to use this landfill. But also the reality that it's very, very hard to reopen a landfill once it's not being used anymore. I hesitate to say impossible, but I don't know of a case, you know, where that's been done. So, you know, if we think we're closing this landfill temporarily to send stuff out of county with the thought that we'll Page 9 December 20, 2000 expand it and reopen it later, I would have to say that would be a very difficult thing to do. And, therefore, if you decide that you do want to preserve this landfill, our argument would be then we should divert part of the waste, but keep this landfill active. Okay, what about out-of-county disposal? I mean, you know, a few years ago if I were doing a presentation like this, I would be dismissing that alternative as fairy tales. I mean, where are you going to send it? Who wants somebody else's garbage? But there's been a revelation in solid waste management in the United States in the last five or seven years. And today, you know, there are a number of jurisdictions: Seattle comes to say mind, Portland comes to mind, Los Angeles for a portion of its waste. New York City has almost closed its only landfill, Fresh Kills, and is now sending most of its waste to various sites, mostly in Virginia. So this is definitely a possible alternative and is worth considering. Now, we haven't gone so far as to identify, you know, where it might go, but just because we're in this business, we know that there's an Okeechobee landfill that takes a lot of waste from around the state. In another county, we're working in Broward County right now, we know that one hauling company is rail hauling waste from Broward County to South Carolina. And we also are in the process of doing a request for expressions of interest, a solicitation for you -- we'll talk about that in a minute -- and one of the responses to that proposed rail haul system to Georgia. So -- and we're not particularly recommending any one of those choices, but we're just saying definitely doable, if you wanted to do it. And in the short-term, frankly, we think you have to do it for at least a portion of the waste. But as you'll see, this is also worth considering as a long-term alternative. Okay, so in the short-term we're saying we've just got to haul some of the waste away, give us enough time to do something in the long term. But in the -- at least some of the waste away. But in the long term, what can we do then? Okay. Again, looking at all the options, we could, what we say, fully utilize this landfill. The term of art in my business is vertical expansion. We could do an expansion in this landfill, probably building on top of the old Cells I and 2, which we'd probably excavate and bring down to bare earth, build sideways and what Page 10 December 20, 2000 we say piggyback on top of that part of Cell 6. If you wanted to do that, there is kind of a tentative proposal from Waste Management on that, which we haven't looked at in detail, but we're pretty confident that another 15 years life in this landfill is definitely achievable. In fact, it's even possible that there would be more life than that, but at this point we're not ready to say that we agree that it would be longer than what that. But 15 years would certainly make a difference. So that's one possibility, to extend the life of this landfill. Another possibility of course is a whole new landfill. A third possibility, as I mentioned earlier, is to take the out-of-county and just make that the permanent solution, just send everything away. And the fourth choice is the technological choice. Build something, some kind of technology -- we'll talk more about what the options are -- that would process the waste, recycle it, burn it, recover energy and so on, which would dramatically reduce but not eliminate the amount of waste that has to be landfilled. Question? CHAIRMAN CARTER: I'll wait until you're done, sir. MR. SCHWARZ: Okay. In analyzing these choices -- the landfill is not an optional one now. In analyzing these choices, a couple of things I have to stress. One is this is a very basic axiom of solid waste management. Landfills are not optional. Even though we may end up choosing some kind of processing technology or something, there's always going to be residue. Everything has residue. There's always going to be some things that can't get processed, unprocessibles. And there's always contingency problems. Suppose a hurricane blows something down, what then? You've got to have a landfill as an ultimate backup for everything. Now, it doesn't have to be your landfill, though. In other words, you could buy air space in somebody else's landfill as a theoretical possibility, but somewhere you have to have landfill capacity to underlie everything. Having said that landfill is absolutely required, the next thought we turn to is a historical fact. The last time somebody permitted a new landfill in Florida was 1991. That was Highland County, which is somewhat more rural than here. Does that mean that it's impossible to permit a new landfill in Florida? No, there's no law or rule that says it's impossible. But it does give Page 11 December 20, 2000 you some sense of how extraordinarily difficult it is to permit a new landfill. Florida is not a hospitable place for landfills, obviously with the groundwater situation in Florida. That would be a difficult undertaking. Okay, let's turn back to those alternatives in a little bit more detail. The first one I want to talk about a little bit more is fully utilizing this landfill. What are the pros and cons of that alternative? Well, the very obvious issue is that this landfill has ongoing odor problems and you're under consent degree right now to solve those problems. Certainly the problems are better than they were, but in our view not completely solved yet. So that's a major con. And you'd -- as well as convincing the local citizens that that's an acceptable choice, we'd have to convince the state too that the odor problem is completely solved. On the pro side, this is a site that already has a history of use for solid waste, obviously. It's a landfill now. It is -- the plain realty is it's much easier to do something with a site that has a history of use for solid waste than it is to take an all new site and develop it for that purpose. And for that reason it would be faster, and time is important here. However, going back again on the con side, it would solve the problem for 10 or 15 or maybe 20 years, and that certainly moves the problem off into the future. But counties last forever. What will we do, you know, in another 10 or 15 years? It is -- I mean, 20 years is the usual planning horizon, so I can't say it's not a long-term solution, but it's not a permanent solution. And if we're going to use the site up there, we would have to remediate, excavate Cells I and 2, which is an engineering issue. What about a new landfill? Well, on the negative side for a new landfill, it would be a major, major siting battle, last years, cost a lot of money. It would take longer, perhaps much longer. And over all, it would cost more. And at the end I'll come to the relative costs of all these choices. However, if we did an all new site, we wouldn't be stuck with the 15 or 20 years life here. You know, we could size that site for 20, 25, 30 years. Still, you would have to, practically speaking, do it again in another 20 or 25 years. Or somebody would. What about the out-of-county alternative? Here's where we Page 12 December 20, 2000 come to the kinds of policy choices that you're going to have to help us understand what your goals are. This is a fast alternative. We could do an RFP for you and, you know, probably have this done in six months and have the waste going away. It would cost more than fully utilizing this landfill. But the key difference in our view in analyzing this alternative is what I call here the loss of control issue. Now you're sending your waste by, let's say, rail to Georgia. What control do you have over that? Suppose they change the rules in Georgia. Suppose the federal rules about interstate wastes have been changed. Suppose the costs go up. Suppose your-- the company that you've hired to do this comes to you one day and says I'm sorry, but they've changed the rules in Georgia and we have to do things differently and your costs are now doubled. What choice would you have? Now, albeit this is not a choice to be dismissed. As I said, there are many -- not many, but there are certainly sizeable jurisdictions doing this today. And as long as the situation is as it is today -- and today in the United States, regardless of what you may have heard about landfill crises and so on, in general in the United States landfill is cheap and plentiful. There's plenty of landfills and relative to other choices they're relatively inexpensive. So if you that think the situation today, which is unusual in our history but is true now is going to continue, if you think that landfill in other places will always be cheap and plentiful, then there's no reason not to do this. It's a relatively inexpensive alternative and the problem will disappear from Collier County. However, I can't tell you that. Nobody knows that. I don't have a crystal ball, you don't have a crystal ball. And if the situation does change, you will have very little control over what you can do about it. By the way, even if you did that, by the way, and we stopped receiving waste at this landfill, of course the odor problem doesn't go away. The odor problem is not primarily a result of the waste that's being received day by day, it's primarily a result of the waste that's sort of stuck down there and saturated with moisture and is now undergoing what we call anaerobic decomposition. That's going to go on for the next 10 or 15 years, at least, even if we stop receiving waste today. So you've got to Page 13 December 20, 2000 manage -- Ken's going to have to manage that problem regardless. So the out-of-county choice doesn't solve that problem. And there is of course the traffic issue of getting this waste someplace. Okay, now we come to the processing technology area. And here in general I want to offer a general caution here. There's a lot of good choices and a lot of pros and cons in here, but there is no magic bullet. There has never been, in my 25 years of doing this work. And here I'll make an unflinching prediction: There never will be. It is not the nature of garbage to be easy to deal with. It's not the nature of garbage to be completely recyclable. And the reason it's garbage is that somebody threw it out because they didn't want it. And so you can accomplish certain things with these technologies, but the kind of endless quixotic search for perfection here will be fruitless and will delay us. So we have to be realistic about what we can achieve and what we can't achieve. To analyze this, I divide these technologies into three big groups: Ancillary, or supplemental things that are useful and helpful, but not at the core of the problem. You know, developmental technologies, things that are promising and may be available in five, 10, 15 years, but really can't be relied on today. And then the third group which of course is where we're going to have to focus, things that are available and proven today. Now, what do I mean by ancillary or supplemental technology? Things like recycling, composting, waste reduction, C&D processing. These are all examples. Now, please understand, I do not mean to be dismissive about these technologies. These are valuable, important, useful technologies. They have a significant roll to play in managing Collier County's waste. Right now Collier County's waste recycling program is not very good. It's probably around 24 percent county-wide. And if you look at the best counties in Florida, they're probably more like 35 percent. So there's certainly room for improvement there. And I think we should do those things. And I think, you know, probably ballpark, a third of the waste in Collier County can be handled with these kinds of technologies and handled cost effectively. So that's certainly a valuable contribution. Page 14 December 20, 2000 But I still call them supplemental because they don't really get to the core of the problem. You could never handle all the waste this way. Because these kinds of technologies ultimately depend on marketability. You've got to end up with something that you can at least give away, if not sell. And the other reason this can't solve the whole problem is that markets change. Remember, we're in the solid waste business for public health reasons, and we can't ever be in a position where, you know, the economy in Southeast Asia takes a dive and all of a sudden our program doesn't work because people don't want waste paper anymore, they don't want it at the right price. So we can use these things but we've got to recognize that they're going to fluctuate. And even when we're having a bad day in this area, we've got to have something else that soaks up everything else. So again, we recommend this -- you'll see later, we recommend this be part of the program, and a significant part, but you can't solve the whole problem here. Now we come to a what I predict will be a controversial area for Collier County. What I call developmental technologies. Examples are pyrolysis. Pyrolysis is something like incineration, but you heat the waste in a container in the absence of air so that it decomposes instead of burns. You get a fuel gas that way, instead of getting heat. There's a technology called refuse derived fuel, where you process the waste and make a fuel, like shredded paper, that you then sell to somebody to burn in their -- usually a big industrial or utility boiler. There are various kinds of biological treatment technologies: Acid hydrolysis, anaerobic digestion, aerobic and anaerobic cornpostings. There are even more exotic technologies: Plasma arc, for example, which uses an extremely high temperature electrical arc to decompose waste back to its constituent atoms. I mean, this is a technology that exists and is used, but it's used for extremely expensive to dispose of waste, like poison gas; the Army uses it for poison gas. Some people have proposed using it for solid waste. And there are many others. And, in fact, as I mentioned earlier, we're engaged on your behalf right now on what we call an RFEI, or requests for Page 15 December 20, 2000 expressions of interest, process in which we have -- the first phase of that was to invite proposals, to submit information based on whether or not they had ever -- anybody who had ever contacted Collier County was invited. In addition to that, we invited a large number of firms that we just know of. And we received six responses to that process, so far. And because that response was a bit disappointing, we're now taking the RFEI process to the next level and we're advertising. This month an advertisement will appear in Waste Stage Magazine, a journal of the solid waste industry national. And anyone who likes will be invited to submit documentation to us. And it will ultimately, in the next month or two, that will end up being a report that we'll give to your staff about what we learned. The next overhead, the request for expression of interest overhead, kind of summarizes the responses we received so far. And, you know, and some of these responses are good technologies that may well end up being part of the program. For example, landfill gas, using landfill gas to generate energy instead of just flaring it is an idea that I think we should think about very seriously. Hauling out of county is an idea that we've already talked about. So that process is underway. But to go back then to the overall picture of developmental, these other technologies, like pyrolysis, like biological treatment, they are, frankly in our industry, they are perennially, you know, out there, just barely out of reach but not ready yet. But they stay out there year after year. And for a county like Collier that has an immediate, urgent problem, I counsel you in the strongest possible terms, don't wait for those solutions to mature. You will be waiting a long, long time. You know, when they're ready, that's fine, but right now those choices are generally not suitable for commercial application. What then is suitable for commercial application in the relatively immediate term, the next five years? There's really just two choices. There's RDF, firing in a dedicated boiler, and there's mass burn incineration. Now, earlier I talked about a kind of different RDF concept where you manufacture the fuel and then sell it to somebody. That, frankly, hasn't worked anyplace in the country that's tried it. And the reason it hasn't worked is that the fuel you make Page 16 December 20, 2000 from garbage isn't very good. So when you try to sell it to somebody to burn in their boiler, they're reluctant to do that. But if you build your own boiler, what I call here a dedicated boiler, this technology can be done. And the other choice is really the traditional choice around the world, mass burn incineration. That's what Lee County, Tampa, Pinelias, Hillsborough, Broward -- it's wildly used in Florida. There's probably 100 or so existing facilities in the U.S., and probably three or 400 in the world. So that's the most widely used technology. Let's look a little bit more at the RDF choice. Here's a diagram of a typical kind of RDF process. This is definitely a viable choice. Palm Beach County does this, Metro Dade facility is kind of a facility like this. Hartford, Connecticut, Honolulu, Hawaii. So it's around and it works. But it's complicated. What this kind of technology says is garbage is not a good fuel -- and it's not, it's a terrible fuel -- and therefore, we're going to do things to the garbage. We're going to shred it, we're going to separate out recyclables, we're going to air classify it, we're going to remove non-ferrous metals. We're going to do a lot of things to the garbage which will generate recyclables, which is good, and which will end up with a smaller quantity of better fuel. And then when we go to build the boiler part, the part that burns the garbage to make energy, we can build a smaller, more efficient, more optimized boiler, and we'll save money on that end. That's the concept. And as I say, there are working facilities so it is a viable choice, but it isn't a very good choice. The record is mixed. There are working facilities, but there have been egregious failures. There have facilities built, even in recent years, to the tune of 70, 80, 90 million dollars that just have not worked and had to be scrapped. The complexity of it, when you're dealing with a material like garbage, which is so difficult to handle, so variable, and beyond your control. You know, when you build a utility boiler to burn coal, you specify what the coal is you want. You get a whole train of coal, and if it's not right, you send it back. Well, when you burn garbage, you have to take it. You're the end of the line. And if it's not right, if it's too wet or has too much of this or that, you're stuck with it. Page 17 December 20, 2000 So the history on these facilities has been difficult to make successful. They cost just as much as other technologies. We had thought earlier in the industry that there would be environmental benefits, that this stuff would burn cleaner. Turned out not to be true, that you can burn just as well, but it's no benefit. And, you know, for me, for me professionally, whenever I visit a facility like this, and we've worked on some of these, I always ask the operator, well, if you had to do it again, and invariably the operator will say, "Well, you know, it works, but I wouldn't do this again. This is too hard." So in the end, we recommend against that choice. And that leaves us with the last choice that frankly, not a very imaginative choice, not a bold, new technology, boring, frankly, in the field, but it works. Simple mass burn technology. It's a very simple system. If we end up -- if you folks end up being interested in this, I'd urge you to go and visit a few plants like this, and we can certainly arrange that. But the concept is very simple. The garbage is dumped into a pit, as it's received from trucks, loaded by cranes into giant furnaces that are specially designed to burn garbage, which is a difficult fuel. It's burned at high temperature. And then there's a ton of air pollution control equipment at the ends of these furnaces. These are probably the most regulated facilities, combustion facilities, that there are. And the heat from the refuse is used to generated steam and electric power. The big advantage is, proven; you can buy this from reputable companies that have financial clout; you can make a contract with these folks and expect that it will be enforceable. And the payoff is that there is a dramatic volume production. The residue from these facilities would be less than 10 percent by way of -- 10 percent by volume of the incoming waste. So suddenly this landfill here, which we'll be talking about, may be stretching to 15 years, suddenly this is it for the next 100, 150 years. And you're not landfilling putrescible material anymore. You're landfilling something that's like --well, it's like ash, it doesn't have any biological activity. Now, there will be -- there are a lot of environmental issues that surround these kinds of technology. If we get involved in this, you'll hear about toxic ash, you'll hear about dioxin, you'll Page 18 December 20, 2000 hear about a lot of issues. And these are valid issues in the sense that these are heavy industrial facilities. They have to be designed and sited properly and operated properly. But if they are -- I mean, and that's true of any big facility. But if they are, they can be operated safely and environmentally well. And as I say, there's 100 of them in the U.S. today. CHAIRMAN CARTER: I promised I wouldn't ask a question, but I have to at this point, because what you just said to me is if it is built right, operated right, environmental concerns are not an issue. Now, there may be a perception that they're an issue, but 'if you do it right, then it's safe and efficient and doesn't hurt the environment or the people in the area. Am I hearing that correctly? MR. SCHWARZ: Absolutely. That is my considered professional opinion, and I've been doing this work for 25 years. CHAIRMAN CARTER: I apologize for the interruption, but I just -- it's always this perception thing that puts these things down for us, versus the reality. MR. SCHWARZ: Yeah. I was -- I drive a lot between here and Tampa. I was talking about this to somebody and they said yeah, well, but the smoke stacks, the smoke is billowing out of them. And I said what do you mean, where are you -- well, you know that plant you pass when you drive to Tampa. Well, that's not a waste to energy plant. That's some sort of fossil fuel plant that's belching that smoke. The waste to energy plants that you do pass, nothing comes out of them. Zero. You can't even tell they're in operation. So perception is a big issue. Okay, so that's all very interesting, but the bottom line, as the saying goes, is always cost. Let's turn to, if you would, this bar chart that shows relative costs. Let me issue the standard consultant disclaimer at this point. There's a lot of engineering to be done in all of these alternatives. We haven't done it. This is a broad spectrum look at all the options. I mean, no sites have been picked for new facilities, no designs have been done. So these are what I would call soft costs. They're kind of generally right, based on our experience in a lot of places around the country. I believe that they're valid to make the kinds of decisions that you folks have to make. You know, what's more expensive than what. And relatively, you know, is it twice as expensive or Page 19 December 20, 2000 10 percent more? So I stand behind that. But by no means do you think that these are, you know, reliable, accurate costs. We're nowhere near, you know, that stage. And before we -- you know, after you give us your direction, before we, you know, do any of these things, we'll be back with much more complete estimates and so on. Here we look at four big picture choices, and we look at the relative cost. The first one, for comparison sake, is your current waste management contract, $17 a ton to operate this landfill. Now, that is an extraordinarily low number. I don't know how you got that contract. But frankly, you must kind of put that out of your mind. Because anything you compare to $17 a ton is going to look tremendously expensive. And that's because $17 a ton is too low, not because other choices are out of the ballpark. And anyway, you can't have the $17 a ton. In other words, that's going away. This thing is filling up. And whatever we do in the future will be more than that. One choice would be, as we said earlier, to expand the life of this landfill. And there -- what it amounted to, we're saying that could be done for some cost in the 30 to $50 a ton range. Another choice would be out-of-county disposal. There we're saying that could be done for 40 to 60. And the last choice, the upper end of the spectrum, would be to build an all new waste to energy plant. And we're saying that could be done from, say, 85 to 110. To maybe make those more meaningful, we've also put that in terms of dollars per household per year. So the $17 a ton translates into $22 per household per year at one extreme, and the waste to energy at the other extreme translates into $122 per household per year. Now, there's two things to say about that. I mean, you might say oh, well, that's five times, six times as expensive. But two things: Remember, the 17 isn't a choice that you can make. It just isn't available for a long-term solution. And second, the 22 isn't the complete cost. That's just the disposal cost. To make a meaningful comparison, we really have to look at all solid waste management costs, of which disposal is only the portion. So to do that, we'll look at the next chart, which is comparative costs. Okay, what we're looking at here now is not just disposal Page 20 December 20, 2000 but collection, household hazardous waste, code enforcement, recycling, all the things that go into managing solid waste in the community. So it's more than just disposal. And what we're looking at here is, you know, dollars per household per year. So, for example, in Collier County, which is the left most bar, just look at the blue portion of the bar now. The total cost for the year is something like $120 per family per year. Okay, if you look at all the other bars for many other counties in Florida, you'll see that that cost is at the lower end of what counties pay. Now, also on that chart we've added in -- and I'll come to this in a minute -- we've added in what we recommend for a short-term solution, which is a combination of continued use of this landfill and out of county. We've added in the long-term solution. And so that corresponds to the -- to the topmost bar here, the one that was $120 a ton. So when we looked at this graph, we said okay, if we go that far, all the way over to the right, we're going from 22 to 120. Wow, that's a six times increase. But I think again that's a misleading analysis. If we look at this graph, we say if we did all those things, if we implemented a complete long-term solution, the overall cost would be something like 200, $205 per household per year in Collier County. And how does that compare to other counties in Florida? Well, it's not as much as the big urban counties like Broward or Dade. Which makes sense, it shouldn't be as much. But it's more or less on target with places like Lee County and Sarasota County. So what that says to me is that those are not unreasonable costs for, you know, a complete solution to this kind of problem. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Is it time for questions? CHAIRMAN CARTER: What I would suggest, that each commissioner ask a question, we'll try to rotate it down the line. So maybe one of your questions will be answered by somebody else. Commissioner Mac'Kie, you were the first one out of the box. Go head. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Well, I just have one question. I have a lot of opinions and thoughts, but one that I didn't follow is how -- from the previous chart to this one where we had the Page 21 December 20, 2000 relative cost, we were looking at the current Collier County landfill of 17 -- 22 bucks per year per household. And then when you take us to this next chart, your current is 122. What is the other hundred bucks? MR. SCHWARZ: Collection is the biggest part of it. This is only the landfill. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Oh, I see. MR. SCHWARZ: Right. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: I see. MR. SCHWARZ: This is everything else, collection, code enforcement, household hazardous waste, whatever else the county does to manage solid waste. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: As opposed to looking just at the landfilling dues-- MR. SCHWARZ: Correct. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: -- what you have on this one. MR. SCHWARZ: Correct. So I think when you think about what the homeowner sees, in the solid waste industry we always talk about tipping fees and dollars per ton. That's our way of looking at it. But when you think of it from the point of view of a taxpayer or homeowner, they don't pay the tipping fee -- COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: No. MR. SCHWARZ: -- they pay so much a month. So this -- I think this is the better way to gauge the impact. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: My only other question then has to do with the relative cost graph again. And I heard you say -- I understand that the waste to energy, the incineration option, is better because it gives us a 100-year solution instead of a 20-year solution. But that's based on the second graph, the second bar in your graph here that says fully utilize Naples landfill, that that would cost 38 to 64 -- you know, let's just say $50 a year, somewhere in the middle of that, versus $125 a year. Am I looking at those charts or am I reading that right? MR. SCHWARZ: Yes. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: And your assessment of fully utilizing this site said that we could get 15 to 20 years out of this site. We've been told in other -- by other consultants that we could get 40 years out of this site by increasing the height and then filling in the gaps between the cells, et cetera. Why -- and if that were true, if it were true that we could Page 22 December 20, 2000 utilize this site and get 40, 50 years out of it for 50 bucks a year per household versus building a waste to energy and getting I don't know how many years out of it, why would it be worth more than double the cost? MR. SCHWARZ: Okay, first let me say it's not quite like that. In other words, the one to look at is this one, right? And if -- okay, if the waste to energy solution is something like 200, 205, then the solution that you're talking about, the kind of intermediate solution of keeping using this landfill, you know, this bar down here -- COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Oh, I understand that. MR. SCHWARZ: -- would stay. So the difference is not between 20 and 50, it's between, I'm guessing here, 150 and 200. That's the magnitude of the difference. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Oh. Because on this chart -- MR. SCHWARZ: Right. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: -- it looks like it's -- that the cost of fully utilizing Naples landfill is 38 to $64 a year. MR. SCHWARZ: And that's true, roughly, if you only consider the landfilling costs. But what we're saying is that's a misleading comparison. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: But if you have this -- is this -- does this number include also hauling and other-- MR. SCHWARZ: No, this -- each of-- COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: So I'm looking at apples to apples here. MR. SCHWARZ: Yes. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: And what I'm trying to understand is why it's your recommendation to go to waste to energy when it is so much more expensive than fully utilizing the current landfill. I don't understand that. If you were factoring in cost, if you're looking purely at science or purely at industry, that's one thing. But if you're a consumer and you're looking of buying an asset, I'm going to see what's my value for my dollar. And I don't understand why it's your recommendation that we go to incineration instead of maximizing this site. MR. SCHWARZ: Well, it's a tough call. Again, I think the meaningful comparison would be based on this graph which would say okay, we're going to -- if we focus on using this Page 23 December 20, 2000 landfill, we would end up with a cost of -- a net cost of something like $150 per household per year. Whereas, if we go to waste to energy, that goes up to 205. Certainly a significant difference. It's a 25 percent difference. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: But I need to understand that. Because I thought what you told me was on this chart, if I were looking at real household costs, I would have to take this 38, or whatever it is, and add to it the hauling costs. And so that's why the second chart is more meaningful. MR. SCHWARZ: Correct. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE.' And I thought you told me that this little peach colored line here that's the waste to energy also had to have added to it hauling costs. MR. SCHWARZ: And that's correct, too. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: So why isn't it meaningful -- what's not true about this statement, fully utilizing the Naples landfill would cost about half as much as waste to energy with regard to these costs? What you're saying is I've got one certainty and that's the hauling and the other, the other, the blue part of this chart, I'm going to pay no matter which of the other alternatives I use. But the question then is I've got one that I have control over, and I can either burn it for twice as much, or bury it for half as much. Am I hearing it right is my real question. Because I understand the policy concern becomes ours. But am I getting the facts right? MR. SCHWARZ: I understand what you're saying. And it's not wrong, but I don't think it's a fair characterization. I would agree with you if you said the difference is $60 a household a year. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Okay, I see your point. Because to say it's twice as much, it's not -- MR. SCHWARZ: It depends on what you're comparing it to. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: -- because the bottom -- the basis -- the cost of disposal is twice as much. But the cost of getting -- of handling your garbage is not twice as much, because that blue line of cost is the same. MR. SCHWARZ: You're stuck with it. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: You're stuck with it. MR. SCHWARZ: That's it. Page 24 December 20, 2000 COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Okay. And then so my last question is, when you looked at this landfill, how carefully have you looked at this landfill with regard to its full capacity? MR. SCHWARZ: That's a good question. Not carefully. There is a kind of a proposal out there which purports to say that this landfill could be expanded for 30 years. We looked at it very briefly. It was not really our scope to look at that in detail. And we noticed that that proposal called for what we would consider extraordinary measures, retaining walls and the like. So we're skeptical about that. I'm not sure where the 40 year came from. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: I saw one that said 40. MR. SCHWARZ: I've got to be fair, no one's asked us to do a careful analysis of that. Possibly it could be used for longer. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: So that's something we should look at before we know which of what looks like are two long-term options. And the other one is, has anybody -- and everybody be ready to lynch me for asking this question, but I have the responsibility of asking it, and that is, the property that's currently designated as excess property, 300 something acres we have around here? MR. SCHWARZ: The area to the north? COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Yes. Has that been included in your fully utilized? MR. SCHWARZ: No. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: What's the capacity of that property? MR. SCHWARZ: We don't know. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: And if we wanted to try to permit a landfill, would that be a new landfill permit or an expansion of this landfill permit? MR. SCHWARZ: In effect, new. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: It would be new? The state would view it as if we had taken a pristine site and started over? MR. SCHWARZ: Because it's on fresh ground. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Okay. CHAIRMAN CARTER: We have a lot of questions here. Let me just tag on that for a second. If we used it as a fill. But if we used it as a site to do a waste energy plant kind of thing, or take ash there, would that fall in the same category? Page 25 December 20, 2000 MR. SCHWARZ: Well, no. No. The -- well, yes and no. The remarks I made about not doing a new landfill in Florida wouldn't apply then. But let's be direct, to do a new waste to energy plant to say take on a big fight. There are certainly forces that don't like waste to energy and would oppose it. Not so much the state in this case, but other forces. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Well, not taking that aside, just saying if we used that space to do that type of thing, that's not a repermitting -- MR. SCHWARZ: No. Well, I mean, you need a whole new permit for a waste to energy plant, but it's not like a landfill, right. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Mr. Coletta, let me -- you were down here first. I'll come right down the line. COMMISSIONER COLETTA: Well, I was just going to say, would it be possible of moving these proceedings along if we might be able to come to a consensus of what we don't want to do? COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: There you go. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Well, that's fine, but I just want to know if there are questions that the board has. COMMISSIONER COLETTA: No, I have no questions. I think the presentation was excellent. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Commissioner Fiala, do have questions? COMMISSIONER FIALA: Yes, mine was from Pam's end. I'm sorry if I'm going backwards, but what she had been questioning, two cost measures, I just wanted to clarify for my mind, when she was asking about the difference in the expanding the landfill versus waste to energy, the waste to energy actually, from what I understood, had 100-year life, possibly, whereas, the expanding the landfill only had 20 years; is that correct? MR. SCHWARZ: Right now the numbers that we're using in this analysis -- which are not the only numbers we could use, but they're numbers we're using -- look to the particular expansion that we talked about, which is the expansion up here to the north, which gives you about 15 years. So that's the correspondence there. Now, the more you want to expand this landfill, the harder it gets; the more tricky you have to get with geotechnical Page 26 December 20, 2000 engineering for get this landfill to keep going up and up. So you're climbing up a cost curve. However, by no means -- I mean, I absolutely agree with you, Commissioner, the waste to energy is by far the most expensive alternative, and it will still be the most expensive alternative, no matter what you do at this landfill. I mean, even the most costly landfill engineering is going to be less than waste to energy. COMMISSIONER FIALA'- My second question to you is kind of an interesting one. I didn't read it in any of the information that we were given. And that is, have there been any studies as to what this landfill does to the health of the citizens around it, such as their breathing, people who have asthma and so forth? And also the birds that feed upon that and then have their droppings in there, has -- is there some kind of health cautions that we should be aware of in having an open landfill like this? MR. SCHWARZ: Well, the answer to your question is surprisingly little. Because waste to energy is so controversial, there have been endless studies on emissions from incinerators. But there are emissions from landfills, too, as this community is well aware. And there has been relatively little work done on that area. But I'm sure you're right, I'm sure there are issues. COMMISSIONER FIALA: And also in the -- you were talking about a monitoring program in one of the handouts that you gave us, and it mentioned where you were going to monitor. And it gave us the scope and everything, but it didn't say when it was to begin, the monitoring of the odors. MR. SCHWARZ: Yeah, we're in the process of setting it up right now with the county, so we need to negotiate that part of our work and then we'll get started. COMMISSIONER FIALA: Thank you. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Commissioner Henning. COMMISSIONER HENNING: Let me start out with a comment. I understand doing a new cell is a short-term, that is not a long-term option, what we need to do here. But I don't understand how this board can consider using this is for a long term, being that we haven't solved our odor problem. We've had it, we haven't, it's continuing. And I don't see that as an option as a long-term -- COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE.' Tom, please remember that he told us that the odor problem stays here, whether we add more Page 27 December 20, 2000 garbage, take -- you know, no matter what. We've got to stop misleading people into thinking we can bury garbage somewhere else and then they don't have an odor problem. That's not true. I'm not suggesting you're misleading them, but we need to be honest about that. The odor problem is here, we've got to solve it, no matter what we do with our future garbage. COMMISSIONER HENNING: Right. CHAIRMAN CARTER: I think that's a separate issue. And it's an important issue, but it has to be resolved, no matter if we put another pound of garbage in here. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Right. CHAIRMAN CARTER: You have to resolve the odor issue. That has got to be part of this presentation and understanding. But go ahead, you have another question. COMMISSIONER HENNING: Oh, I have several, thank you. How did we get at this point where we are at an emergency where we don't know -- you know, there's no lead time on this and we're at a critical point. And Commissioner Carter, you said you can fill in the group on this? CHAIRMAN CARTER: Well, we -- Commissioner Mac'Kie can give you a longer history. We did not make the decisions that needed to be done for a long term. We danced with it, we tried to go towards re-siting another area. The gentleman out here just told us this afternoon hasn't happened since 1991 in Florida. Practically impossible to do. I think we deluded ourselves into believing that something was going to happen, and it didn't happen. And we kept postponing it and postponing it and postponing it, and we put ourselves in a crisis. And the short term that I have been on this board, it has been a big issue and one that I have -- and Commissioner Mac'Kie I think both have been uncomfortable with because we couldn't get a decision. We wanted a decision, we wanted more time. We knew the barn was burning, and nobody was ready to put the fire out. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: And what all those former boards was willing to do was chase distractions and chase after options that are not viable. And that caused us to be in a crisis. COMMISSIONER FIALA: Do you also mean how did we get this odor problem? Page 28 December 20, 2000 COMMISSIONER HENNING: Oh, I know how we got our odor problem. And in my opinion, it's because of the contract that we have. Of course, that's my opinion. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Well, that's all right. But other questions that you want to ask -- COMMISSIONER HENNING: Thank you. CHAIRMAN CARTER: -- Malcolm Pirnie about is where I think we need to go here. COMMISSIONER HENNING: One option is to hauling out of county. And you identified BFI as one of the sites in Okeechobee, and I believe it's in -- the other one in Georgia. MR. SCHWARZ: BFI was the company that's now rail hauling from Broward to South Carolina. Okeechobee is a waste management landfill. COMMISSIONER HENNING: Okay. The -- when you said when we close this landfill down, let me get back to the odor problem, because that needs to be cleared up, because it wasn't very clear to me. Even though we close this landfill down, we still have an odor problem. And you're saying it's not coming from the open face. You're not meaning that we don't have a problem with the open face odor. MR. SCHWARZ: The open face is probably a contributor. And we have kind of another issue, but we also did a study of the odor problem, and we have some recommendations, operational recommendations, that would change the way this landfill is operated. But I've got to say, in all honesty, I think the core of the odor problem is the deep anaerobic activity. And if that's not controlled, nothing else will work. And we've got to get that under control first. COMMISSIONER HENNING: The waste to energy, can you tell us what kind of emission problems it has? MR. SCHWARZ: I can -- the emissions issues, it's very tightly regulated. You would have all the normal federal air pollution kinds of emissions, particulates, NOX, SOX, mercury, led, cadmium, all the normal emissions have to be controlled. The issue that usually gets a lot of publicity from waste management places is dioxin emissions, and that's a very sensitive issue, because dioxins have been shown to biocumulate. Page 29 December 20, 2000 COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: And they're carcinogens, right? MR. SCHWARZ: And they're carcinogens. And so they have to be tightly controlled. And my message is that in our experience a well designed -- properly designed, properly operating facility can meet these standards end can up, you know, emitting infinitesimal quantities of these materials. COMMISSIONER HENNING: Okay. I can tell you that I am interested in visiting a site or a few sites. MR. SCHWARZ: My pleasure. COMMISSIONER HENNING: And who is the fight with waste management? COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Michael? The Conservancy's here, they might be able to answer that. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Well, they'll have their chance to speak. COMMISSIONER HENNING: Okay, in -- MR. SCHWARZ: In my experience, there have been a number of environmental organizations. I think of Berric Commoner (phonetic), the Center for Biology for Natural Systems. I think of Neil Seidman (phonetic) for the Institute of Local Self Reliance. I think of Paul Connit (phonetic), although he's moved on to opposing fluoridation now. He may spare us. But I -- CHAIRMAN CARTER: He's the same guy who's working on diapers for the birds that fly around the landfill, I think. MR. SCHWARZ: But seriously, these are serious fights. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Oh, yeah. MR. SCHWARZ: They will -- these folks will cause you to spend a lot of money to do this sort of thing. CHAIRMAN CARTER: What always interests me, Commissioner, is that the people that don't even live here, they will come in and they will make us a cause. And, you know, this is our county, this is our situation. And if we are convinced as the citizens here that it works for us, I'd rather they just left us alone. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: But they won't. CHAIRMAN CARTER: But they won't. They will make us an issue. Because whatever their issue is, they take it all over the place. Page 30 December 20, 2000 But I'm like you, I'm very interested in a mass burn. And the question I have on that, when you mass burn and you generate energy, what percent of that comes back in to run your operation? Is it a constant recycling of energy? MR. SCHWARZ: Yeah, you can use some of the energy, usually in the form of steam, to run some of the plant. But you still get a very large net export of energy. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Okay. So we have a large export -- MR. SCHWARZ: Oh, yes. CHAIRMAN CARTER: -- of energy, which is a revenue stream. MR. SCHWARZ: Absolutely. And it's a revenue stream that's a little premature, but it's looking better now than it has for the last 10 years, with energy shortages starting to perk up all around the country. COMMISSIONE.R. MAC'KIE: What percentage of return? I mean, what do you I frankly always thought waste to energy was Orwellian and not real, and that an incinerator is an incinerator. So if it is really waste to energy, how much energy? What does it really produce, a lot of energy, a little energy? MR. SCHWARZ: You know, order of magnitude of plant size for Collier County would be something like 30 megawatts. Let's see -- GOMMISSIONER MAG'KIE: Would that run -- MR. SCHWARZ: -- these plants -- right, what does that mean? It would light a lot of houses. In terms of utility power plants, these are small. A utility power plant is easily hundreds of megawatts, sometimes thousands. But they're in the business of generating electricity. So 30, 40, 50 megawatts would be a few percent, three percent, four percent, I'm guessing, of the energy generation in Collier Gounty. GOMMISSIONER MAG'KIE: But that's a real number, GOMMISSIONER FIALA: Yes. GHAIRMAN CARTER: But even perhaps, though, it might run our water treatment plants in the south. It might -- I mean, I see a lot of possibilities with that. MR, SGHWARZ: Yes. If you can do that and use the power and therefore not buy, instead of sell the power, you're much better off and the economics are much more favorable. Page 31 December 20, 2000 CHAIRMAN CARTER: Let me just ask a couple of questions, though, in terms of -- one of the options is, is to transport out. MR. SCHWARZ: Correct. CHAIRMAN CARTER: But correct me on this. We do expose ourselves, A, to loss of control because wherever you send it, they may change the name of the game. Also, if for any reason they were sued for anything that went in their landfill, we could be named as a contributor of that landfill in those lawsuits. MR. SCHWARZ: Precisely. You become a potentially responsible party. What you would have to do is have us or somebody like us look very carefully at the landfill that you were sending it to, knowing that if there were environmental problems 10, 15 years in the future, they would come back to you. But even though we could -- and we've done that for clients, and we could look at it for you. We can't be there 24 hours, seven days a week. So if something did go wrong, counties have deep pockets. CHAIRMAN CARTER: But having asked that, the other question I have is if we can in the short-term solution here, if we can, as we're trying to develop that short term, I think you said that we may have to ship part of our garbage out. Can't we do that in combination? Get ready, get the permitting, do whatever we need to do to expand the life of this landfill for what I'm going to call the 30-year solution, and at the same time, if we can't get this done on a timely basis because we're up against the wall, can't we do this in combination by shipping out -- MR. SCHWARZ: Exactly. CHAIRMAN CARTER: -- temporarily? MR. SCHWARZ: Exactly. And one of these overheads got lost, but basically we have a three-part recommendation. In the immediate term we're asking that you let us and staff negotiate with Waste Management to send part of the waste -- COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: He's got it. MR. SCHWARZ: His don't blow away. Thanks. -- to negotiate with Waste Management. One thing is to implement a complete and final solution to the odor problem. I mean, make no mistake about it, if we can't get this odor problem completely solved -- and by involved I mean there should be no detectable odor where anybody lives, even one day a year, we can't do that -- Page 32 December 20, 2000 COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: When are we discussing that in today's presentation? MR. SCHWARZ: Pardon me? CHAIRMAN CARTER: Or are we -- COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: When are we discussing the odor problem and how we're going to solve it today? CHAIRMAN CARTER: Jim, is that part of -- COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: We have to talk about that today. I mean, I hope it's on the agenda. Because we can't talk of-- just like Tom said, we can't talk about anything else until we talk about how that's going to be solved. MR. MUDD: Yes, ma'am. What we asked -- COMMISSIONER HENNING: Mr. Mudd, one minute, please. One thing that we did talk about is having emergency storage for in case of a hurricane. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Right. COMMISSIONER HENNING: I think something that we need to look at is what kind of waste are we going to have during emergency hurricane, and does it have to be lined cell space? MR. MUDD: It does not. MR. SCHWARZ: That's quite right. You could very definitely have provisions, I mean, a brush and debris of that sort, trees, what have you, which a lot of what you get in a hurricane is that kind of material, does not have to necessarily go into a Class I landfill. And it would make a lot of sense to have some plan for that kind of debris so as to not use up your Class I space. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Okay, let me tag on this. With the land we have in surplus, if we took that back and had it here and we had a hurricane, we could use that site to store? MR. SCHWARZ: Theoretically possible, yes. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Okay, back to your question, then, to Commissioner Mac'Kie's question, over to Jim Mudd. Now we're going to discuss this odor thing today. I also have -- I don't know how many people have signed up, Tom. MR. OLLIFF: You've probably got about 12. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Okay. So we need public comment. So let's answer the questions to Malcolm Pirnie, let's have Jim Mudd answer the other question, then let's go to public comment. COMMISSIONER HENNING: This is more to staff. Under Page 33 December 20, 2000 emergency conditions do we need to have it in our growth plan on how we're going to take care of our waste in case of a hurricane? That has to be in the growth plan, or is it in the growth plan? MR. OLLIFF: No, the county's comprehensive plan simply requires -- it's dealing with day-to-day management of the solid waste stream. I think emergency backup plans and things like that for especially Class III type landfills are not covered within our comprehensive plan. CHAIRMAN CARTER: All right, any other questions of Malcolm Pirnie? We'd like to keep you on standby. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Weren't you our odor consultant as well? CHAIRMAN CARTER: So you may-- COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: I'd just like to hear what plan is on solving the odor problem. MR. OLLIFF: Steve, why don't you go ahead and give them a five-minute summary of where we are. MR. SCHWARZ: And this ties together. I'm not ignoring the question. In going back to the overall recommendations, the short-term recommendation is to sit down with Waste Management and negotiate kind of a comprehensive set of objectives; one of which would be a solution to the odor problem. The steps that Waste Management has taken so far we think are all in the right direction and we think have resulted in significant improvement, but we're not convinced that it's enough. And I guess we would characterize the overall situation, and I include in that the new blower, which is not installed yet but which is going to be installed, we would characterize all of that as borderline. Maybe just enough -- COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Even including the new -- MR. SCHWARZ: Even including the new blower. And we say that because again, this goes back to what I started to say earlier, what's the goal here? The goal has to be not that we only occasionally have an odor problem or rarely. The goal has to be never. And frankly, honestly, if we can't achieve that, the state's going to close us down and that option's going to be gone. Bud I think it is achievable. I mean, I can take you to other places, other landfills that have had this kind of problem. Page 34 December 20, 2000 And this is -- I mean, this is a rare problem. It doesn't happen in every landfill, but it happens. I know of several where it's kind of caught fire like this. And it can be controlled. And the key to control is just what you see here, basically. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Catching fire. MR. SCHWARZ: Capping and -- and that would be a fast way. Not while we're here, please. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: No, I meant flaring the gas. MR. SCHWARZ: Right. But that system we think needs to be improved. And part of this would be to negotiate with Waste Management a very clear step-by-step with time tables you're going to add this, you're going to add that and you're going to add the other thing and so on. So that's one element of the short-term solution. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: And if I could just comment to Commissioner Henning, that one I can't tell you why we haven't done it. I would love to know why that isn't done. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Because we have asked that question forever. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Because we've been asking for that for years, for my six years, and I know they were asking for it since the Seventies. I don't know why that hasn't been done. COMMISSIONER FIALA: What hasn't been done. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Control the odor. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Negotiated a contract with -- frankly, hold Waste Management's feet to the fire on the contract that says they will use best management practices sand control the odor problem. Why we haven't done that, I do not know. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Well, we're not going to answer that today. COMMISSIONER HENNING: We should have a discussion about that. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Well, what we need is what we're hearing from Malcolm Pirnie. I'd like to hear from Jim Mudd, because it's -- I can't deal with what happened in the past, but I can deal with the now and the future. And that's what I want to know what we're doing, how fast we're doing it and when will we get it to the point which you said, we don't have an odor problem. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Jim, we have to be honest about this, too. Why should we believe you, that you're going to come Page 35 December 20, 2000 up? I mean, I'm sorry to be looking at you, but you're the guy we hired. Why should we believe you, that you're going to come up with a solution when we have been told -- I've been told personally for six years we're doing everything that can be done. It can't get better than it is. It's going to get better. It will be better tomorrow. We've got another idea for how to make it better. For six years. How are you going -- how am I go to go convince the community? But how are you going to convince me? CHAIRMAN CARTER: Well, let's hear from Jim Mudd, and maybe he's going to -- if we can't believe him, we're in trouble. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Well, I believe this gentleman, too. I'm just saying -- MR. SCHWARZ: Well, I think there are -- COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: -- there's a theoretical -- MR. SCHWARZ: There are differences. There are -- I mean, in the past, you -- the county has basically relied on Waste Management to both propose solutions and to implement those solutions and to monitor itself. And also, all of that's been done under the existing contract which has a $17 per ton cost. Our philosophy is you never want your contractors to lose money. You always want your contractors to make a reasonable profit on what they're doing. Somehow, I don't know how, we weren't here, but somehow you've got Waste Management in a difficult situation, where they're doing the right things, I mean, they're making the right steps, but they're definitely going step by step, as perhaps any of us would if we were faced with a very strict cost sealing. I mean, part of this, when we sit down -- if you agree to let us negotiate this with Waste Management, we're going to ask for some significant changes in what they're doing. But it's also going to cost more. And that's part of the deal to get this problem solved. The other thing that's been missing here, in our opinion, is the monitoring function. I mean, when you hire a contractor to do something, I mean, you can build the simplest piece of sidewalk; if you hire a contractor to do it, you hire a resident engineer to look at the shop drawings and see that it's getting done right and basically keep the contractor honest. That really hasn't been here. I mean, you have staff, but Page 36 December 20, 2000 your staff in this area is very few people. But I think -- you know, I mean, it can be done. These problems have been solved. As to whether or not you should trust us, that you'll have to decide yourself. But technically this is a solvable problem. The last element of that short-term part, by the way, is the monitoring program, which we're going to recommend. In other words, that will involve both our professionals, equipment that will be installed, but also citizens that we will recruit and train as kind of odor centuries that will help us to identify the problem. Believe me when I say I'm not for a minute saying this landfill isn't an odor problem. But it may not be the only problem. There may be other things happening here too that this monitoring program will identify. And then we can tackle those problems, too. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Let me please just get to say in my frustration if I in any way implied that your voracity was questionable, I did not intend to. I am frustrated with the people who have been saying that the problem will be solved. Certainly not with you. I apologize if I sounded that way. CHAIRMAN CARTER: And I -- what I would like to add to this, I think in the past, Commissioner, we have been penny wise and pound foolish in this area. I think we really need to find out what it takes to get it done and get it done. And I'm not looking to spend a lot of money, and I agree with you, if the contractor hasn't fulfilled the obligations, they need to be held accountable. But if what they're doing is because it's a tight contract and it's not enough there, we've got to find those things out. I want to get it fixed. Let's just get it done and find out how we can do it. So I would look to you and I would look to our staff -- COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: And at the same time, I'm going to keep saying this: If Waste Management made a bad deal and they have to lose money on this landfill to live up to their contractual obligations, you know, over all I don't think they're a company that's in the red. If they made a bad deal and they've got to lose money here, then they have to. Because they have to do what they told us. We've got to get what we bought, whether we got a great deal or not. MR. SCHWARZ: With all due respect, Commissioner, you may have to make a choice between whether you want a solid Page 37 December 20, 2000 waste solution or a lawsuit. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Good point. Very good point. CHAIRMAN CARTER: I understand both sides, but I want it fixed. Mr. Mudd? MR. MUDD: Sir, what we tried to do, as far as Malcolm Pirnie is concerned, is to bring an outside source in to give us a technical view of the present monitoring and odor control system that's in place right now on -- in this landfill. Malcolm Pirnie has given us their draft. The draft basically says on the average in other landfills that the wells are normally one per acre. What you've got in this landfill is 1.5 per acre. They've described areas where the gas pulling system near the top of the membrane might be a little bit inadequate. And Waste Management has started to lay horizontal piping close to the top of the membrane so they can pull off that gas so it doesn't well under and bubble up and cause a place where gas could escape. They've also looked at the existing blower and flare and said yes, you need an increase. And Waste Management has seen fit to increase that. But Malcolm Pirnie has said, you know, that's an intermediate step. You probably, once Cell 6 is on line and it's totally encapsulated, you're going to need an additional capability to keep moving that order to create that vacuum. And you're probably going to have to go with a bigger blower and flare. What we've done is put in a permit application into the Florida Department of Environmental Protection for this intermediate flare so we could increase almost double the capacity of our ability to pull gasses out of the landfill. Where that sits is we're doing some modeling work with Waste Management, because that's part of the application, because they have to do an air quality permit process through EPA. That was put in last Friday in Tallahassee. The title five paperwork is at -- in Fort Myers. Mr. Barbachia (phonetic), who sits back there, he's sunning himself in the back. Phil, if you could raise your hand. Okay, there's our representative from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, if you have any questions. That's in there. And our best guess of all the collective minds with FDEP in Page 38 December 20, 2000 Tallahassee and Malcolm Pirnie, we've met and basically think that the permit for the increased flare and blower will be on station at the end of February. The blower and flare on site. All they have to do is hook up the flange. That takes about four hours. And then we get on with the additional well areas and some of that horizontal piping will help. They've also placed some horizontal piping in the active face. So they're laying the piping down and then they're laying the garbage on top and hooking it into the flare system. So if there's any odors that are coming from the flare, that will help contain it and pull it off as part of that process. We have not discussed the cost of any increases in that process because we just received the Malcolm Pirnie report. We have to do that and we have to get into negotiations with the present contractor for the landfill, sir. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: One more question, if I may, on that point. You've described the interim flare permitting process, and we think we'll have that by the end of February, and then we'll continue to lay the horizontal wells. Is it possible -- or I want to frame this in a way that you can only give me the answer I want, Mr. Mudd, so I'm sorry. But the question is, are you going to have the final -- God, I hate to said final solution, but the solution to the problem, the ultimate solution to the problem in place before the hot season, or are we going to have the interim solution in place before summer and then we have less of a problem this summer but still a problem? MR. MUDD: Ma'am, we're going to have -- one of the things we're discussing is to keep the existing flare on. It's got 1,700 feet per minute capability, along with the 3,000 one. We're into that discussion. This way we can use them on line. We're going to need to up our permit process. We're going to have to do another process, they're going to have to do more modeling. It's a permitting issue after that. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: But this gentleman told us that what we have currently permits -- if I heard you right, what we have currently permits applications for -- I can't remember your exact words but it's on the edge, it's the base, it's the minimum, it's close enough. What I'm wondering is what are we doing Page 39 December 20, 2000 beyond that? And I guess that's part of your odor control problem with Waste Management. If we authorize this -- I guess we can't do that today, but if we authorize that at our very next meeting, would we be able to have those negotiated solutions in place for next summer? MR. SCHWARZ: The answer is I'm not sure, because it involves a negotiation. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Okay, so from a permitting solution, it's going to be a money question. MR. SCHWARZ: No, it just may not be practicable to do everything that must be done. We can do much of it. And a good part of what should be done falls under the heading of redundancy and -- for example, the blower that's here but not installed yet is probably big enough for right now. But suppose that blower breaks and it's the only one? So our recommendation is there would have to be two, at least as a standby, things like that. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Commissioner Fiala. COMMISSIONER FIALA: I just wanted to by sum it -- Pam, you don't know this, I had sent a request to the DEP, and you didn't know that either, to extend that to fall, because I felt they should go through the whole summer cooking months as well as the rainy season so we get a true and accurate evaluation of the odor control. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: To extend our consent degree. MR. MUDD: Yes, ma'am. Right now the extent decree has been extended to I August. We can test it then and make sure it's under control. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Commissioner Coletta. COMMISSIONER COLETTA: Mr. Mudd, welcome aboard. You have inherited one hell of a mess. And forgive the distrust of this board, but we've been promised numerous times that this odor solution was going to be fixed next month, three months from now, six months from now, next year, absolutely no problem at all. We've had terrible results coming back with -- have had to live with a real problem many years now. And East Naples also. And this problem is ongoing. Never seems to end. And I hope the board keeps this consideration in front of them as it is at this present site. I don't think we're ever going to fix it. We spent what, close Page 40 December 20, 2000 to a million dollars trying to relocate. We spent a half million dollars on fans we never put up. We're going nowhere but the right direction. So if we're asking the questions in a fairly arrogant manner, there's a reason for it. Don't take it personally, but there's going to be some tough questions asked in the next hour or so. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Other questions for Mr. Mudd or Mr. Pirnie at this time? Because I want to go to public comments. Commissioner Fiala? COMMISSIONER FIALA: Just the last thing. And this is mostly for my clarification, as well as people that might be new to this situation. The odor problem itself. I understand that the odor problem was created when, by holding their feet to the fire of Waste Management, they came up with creative ways to cover our landfill at night rather than the soil that we had been using. I don't remember any smell before 1990. And then they started grinding up the gypsum, the wallboard? MR. SCHWARZ: Yeah, in our view there's a combination of factors that make this landfill what it is. Every landfill is an anaerobic biologic -- anaerobic, meaning no oxygen. And it is the nature of anaerobic organisms to generate the kind of terrible gasses that we aerobic people don't like. But usually the volume of gas is much less. To some extent what has happened here is going to be lost because it's buried. But based on our previous experience and the history here, basically we have a line landfill, so it catches water. Second of all, you don't have a good leachate collection system, so the water has been allowed to accumulate and the waste is saturated, it's wet. And water is the absolute requirement for life. With no water, you have no life. And with lots of water, you have lots of life. So you have no oxygen, you have lots of water and to make things works you have sludge and gypsum board, which obtains sulfur. They like to eat this stuff and among other things make hydrogen sulfide. COMMISSIONER FIALA.' So to conclude then, our goals now are to eliminate that odor with a deadline that we're going to come up with, and also to solve the problem of future landfill problems so that our problem isn't a Bandaid effect but actually for the future generations of our community. MR. SCHWARZ: In the short run, work something out with Page 41 December 20, 2000 Waste Management to get the odor problem solved, to haul away, to extend the life of Cell 6 and to put in place the odor monitoring program. In the intermediate problem, we would suggest doing what will give you a few years, which you need, and in the longer term, aggressive recycling, waste to energy, use the site for landfill. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE-' One last comment. Because I think I've kind of gotten it. Just so you know, in the information you gave us to read ahead of time, the recommendation sheet is in there, if anybody is looking for it. First of all, it's the best presentation I've ever had in my six years on this issue. And I'm grateful for it. Because you've encapsulated the issues and made it in plain old people talk instead of engineer-ese. And I'm kind of coming down to understanding, you know, this recommendations sheet. There really aren't a lot of alternatives to it. I mean, thank you for telling us we had huge decisions to make. But it almost seems like there aren't very many logical choices that are on this recommendations sheet. CHAIRMAN CARTER: I agree with you, Commissioner Mac'Kie. They have been brutally honest. They have told us this is what you're faced with.. And this is what I have asked for since I've been here. Tell me what we can do. I have refused to move the problem. I am still on that position. I don't believe in moving problems, I believe in fixing problems. And I don't want to give up an opportunity to best use to fix the problems. You have capsulized for me some directions this board has considered to deal with these issues, and I value that and I appreciate what you have given us this afternoon. But I would like to go to public comments so that we then can come back to Commissioner Coletta who said what don't we want to do. Mr. Olliff, we need -- we need a break here. You need a break, I need a break. Take five. (Recess.) Item #2B PUBLIC COMMENT CHAIRMAN CARTER: Thank you. We're alive and well? If Page 42 December 20, 2000 we could get everybody back here, we need to go to public comment. Commissioners, you need to be here. MR. OLLIFF: Mr. Chairman, I'm going to go ahead and start calling public speakers. CHAIRMAN CARTER: All right, let's call the public speakers, and move right along, folks. MR. OLLIFF: I'll call them two at a time. And if the first speaker could come to the podium and the next speaker could be ready and on deck, if you would. The first speaker is Ray (sic) Brooks, followed by John Viiiella. CHAIRMAN CARTER: To remind everybody, you have five minutes to share your thoughts with us. Thank you. MR. BROOKS: Good afternoon, commissioners. My name is Ralf Brooks, and I'm an environmental attorney. I'm here before you today on a couple of issues. One is the landfill gas utilization proposal that was put on the board just very briefly and not really talked about. It goes a long way toward solving some of your problems. One is that one of the responders to the request for information on that has offered to pay for the entire system of capturing the landfill gas that comes off not only this closed landfill that we're standing on, but also puts horizontal pipes in the open landfill to capture the gas there. And what they plan to do is take that gas, utilize it to make energy and use some of that energy to make biodiesel, which is recycling the restaurant waste and grease currently used in the City of Naples, it could be used in the trolley buses, in the diesel engines there to power them in 100 percent form without any modifications to the diesel engine at all. This is a good alternative, one, because it's free to the county and free to the taxpayers. The consulting contractor would build this thing, privately finance it, get it up and running, and it would capture more gas than a blower system, and help with your odors even more. There's currently three facilities in Florida, Orlando, in Orange County, Escambia and Polk County. All these things are up and running. There's 23 other ones around the country. In addition, it's better than a blower system, too, because it's what's called reasonable available control technology, or RACT or best available control technology, in that you're not Page 43 December 20, 2000 taking landfill gas, dangerous gasses, and flaring them off and creating an air pollution problem, you're actually capturing those gasses and using them to create energy. And because it is a money-making venture, royalties can actually be given back to the county. The contract in Orange County calls for $400,000 a year to come back. That can all be negotiated later. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Wait a minute, you pay us to take away our smell -- the smell problem? MR. BROOKS: That's the idea exactly. Not particularly me, but -- COMMISSIONER HENNING: I heard him say taking away the gas, not the odor. MR. BROOKS: And like the person before me said, there's no total solution to it, but it does involve more wells, more removal of gas, less fugitive emissions, and no burning of the gas into the air. That flare out there does not have 100 percent burn rate. A lot of it escapes. And there's a lot of escaping of that open landfill over there that would be captured through horizontal piping. All of that could be converted into about five megawatts of energy, enough to power a couple thousand homes. And also, to power the small biodiesel refinery. What would it take in terms of land? A quarter of an acre for the landfill gas utilization project in an area 200 feet by 200 feet, the size of maybe an average lot to build a biodiesel refinery to produce 400,000 gallons of biodiesel to run the bus systems with. I urge you to look into that. Also, the comprehensive plan policy 1.3.2(b) says that you'll continue to investigate things for cost-saving methods in landfills, including investigating methane gas recovery and use. So we think it is a cost savings, if someone else is willing to pay for it and give you royalties every year from it. And it's a reasonably available control technology that would remove more odors than the current proposal. Thanks. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Thank you. MR. OLLIFF: Next speaker is John Viiiella, followed by Gary Burris. MR. VILLELLA: Good afternoon, commissioners. My name is Page 44 December 20, 2000 John Viiiella. I'm manager of business development for DTE Biomass Energy. DTE Biomass Energy is a Detroit Edison affiliate. Our charter in life is building landfill gas to energy projects. We have built 26 around the United States. We have three in Florida: Orange County, Escambia County, Polk County. These projects basically are configured to collect as much gas as possible. And oftentimes that brings with it the obligation to build additional wells, to collect additional gas. That gas is used unofficially. It is a better situation than possibly just pulling on the landfill harder. You're increasing -- with additional wells, you're increasing your zone of influence, hence you have a greater probability of collecting more gas and more odors, because that's where the problem is, is within the gas. Now, recently I responded to an RFI issued by the solid waste department, and I outlined three projects within that that we would be willing to investigate, on our dime, to see what's suitable for Collier County. We build those projects, we operate those projects all on our own resources, which are considerable. We built the Orange County project. That project is designed for collection of eight million cubic feet a day of landfill gas. And currently sending gas to the Statten (phonetic) power station. It's a 900-megawatt utility plant. We're displacing their use of coal. So two things are happening: The gas and the odor is disappearing from the community, they're burning less coal in that power station. The EPA tells me that that project is the equivalent of taking 187,000 cars off the road. That can be done here at entirely a third party's expense. We don't need anything from the county except an RFP on the table. And we can bid the project, and if it's unsuitable, you're not obligated in any way. But there are several things that happen. It's a cost avoidance situation. We operate and maintain the gas collection system, which is an expensive thing over a 30-year period of time. We pay the county a royalty of some sort for the gas rights, and we provide a beneficial use project. So I definitely think that, you know, we're talking about spending a lot of money here today on various solutions, and I think you can offset those expenses on a landfill gas project, and we're offering to do that free of charge. So it's a rather simple Page 45 December 20, 2000 thing, okay? CHAIRMAN CARTER: Thank you. MR. VILLELLA: Any questions? CHAIRMAN CARTER: Not at this point. But I think Mr. Mudd will be entertaining all of those proposals to us as we progress with our deliberations. Thank you. MR. OI. LIFF: Mr. Chairman, next speaker is Gary Burris, followed by Michael Hastings. MR. BURRIS: Hello, commissioners. I'm Gary Burris. I'm with CR, the Green Model Project. I've been working here in the county for the almost two years with the City of Naples, developing a recycling program where we take waste cooking grease and we can even take grease trap waste -- I'm meeting with your sanitation people tomorrow-- convert this into biodiesel, which will solve your problem. Also, if you use biodiesel, it brings you into compliance with the future EPEC regulations that are kicking in for county use. What it also does is it increases the functionality of your sewage plants. I know you've got a serious problem out there. We feel that the technology is there to deal with this, it's working in certain parts of the world, and this can be converted into power plant fuel and biodiesel. What we're proposing and working in conjunction with Detroit Edison is to build a facility here, powered by landfill gas from their system. That would be part of the usage of the gas right there. The other thing that they're proposing is this outside generation of electricity that can be sent to say this development over here, or sold to FP&L, which is not the best advantage. We'd really like to see this energy stay in the county as a green energy program. What -- with all the numbers that we're working with, and working with the city, it looks like that we can do what we say. We can -- it won't cost you guys anything to do this. And what we can do is produce enough fuel just from waste resources in this county to make this county very close to energy independent from the rest of the planet. And that's real. The numbers are there, the amounts of grease are there, the cubic feet of gas coming out of this landfill is there. John -- Mr. Viiiella needs to really do the feasibility to get into the deeper layers of it. Page 46 December 20, 2000 How will it work, completely work, with the county? What we would need to do is the county just commit to using biodiesel. The City of Naples is committing to using 100 percent, because they did an eight-month biodiesel demonstration and loved it. No smoke, engines ran better, eight percent better fuel economy. So this is all real. See, the diesel engine was built to run off vegetable oil, not diesel. Diesel is the adaptation. So if you go back to the natural fuel, then you've solved a problem. I've used it on sailing ships. We have a sailing ship we use in our work for five years. Love it. Did 20,000 miles in the last year in an RV talking to people around the state with this stuff. Flawless. This is -- from an activist, this is the most real thing I've ever seen. And the other part of the problem, we're working with a company out of Canada that has an artaerobics system. And I see in what was handed out by Malcolm Pirnie that it's developmental. That's wrong. There have been anaerobic systems in operation in Europe for 20 years. A fully funded proposal would be coming to you that will do several things. It could take all of your organic waste, no stink whatsoever, five to 10 megawatts of energy, 66,000 tons of fertilizer for your farming community. And we've tried to get these ideas out there and have not been successful. Obviously you didn't hear it on the agenda today. This is not developmental technology. The City of Toronto has partnered with this company. They opened their facility in June and everybody is happy as you can be. What they're doing with the compost that they're making, they're putting it in 25-pound bags, they're selling it as a profit to the city and to the county. So we do want the opportunity to joint venture if possible with Detroit Edison and other people to bring a package here that would make this county a green model for the nation. City of Naples has seen that after two years of me repeatedly coming back trying to develop this. They voted to move forward. I'm working with Mr. Mercer now and his staff to develop a budget, plan, step-by-step how we do it, and it all looks very good. Looks very good, the last conversation I had with Mr. Mercer, and I'll be working with his staff next week and I'll be with your sewage plant people tomorrow to talk about a system. Page 47 December 20, 2000 Now, the grease water separation similar, you may have to pay for that. It's not a lot. You know, 2, $300,000, it will solve your grease water problem. Even if you don't make fuel out of it. If you take that out of the water, then you can either use anaerobic digestion to take it and turn it into fertilizer and methane, or you can landfill it. You know, there's your option. There's are options out here. You know, taking that stuff and putting it in a pile is like talking about keeping a wagon wheel company going when the space shuttle is out there ready to be launched. And if you look at yesterday's front page, energy crisis looming, brownouts in California, problems out in the Middle East with war. Dock strikes in Venezuela, that's our oil. Three million barrels a day that's sitting there on the docks not coming out. So there's a lot of the things can shut this country's energy down. This is an opportunity for at least this community to have an energy source, and everybody's sweating, you know, when it's hot and the fuel runs out. Thank you very much. I look forward to working with you in the future. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Thank you very much. MR. OLLIFF: Michael Hastings will be followed by Mike Delate. MR. HASTINGS: I'm running from the other side. About the past year I've been working on a documentary about sustainable energy sources. And I'm here basically just to tell you, I've seen some of these things in operation. I was up in Orlando, filmed the Detroit Edison project, done interviews in Naples with some of their people who are very interested in the biodiesel project and landfill to gas. One of their people, I know -- I know you were concerned a little bit about people from the outside coming in to tell you how to run your county. That's not really what any of us are trying to do. We do want you to think about the rest of the world, but part of what I'm here for is to see what actually happens, how does this process work. And I can see you have a difficult job. But one of the things from one of the interviews in Naples was a gentleman saying he was wanting to see these projects go forward, particularly in Naples, because he wanted them to be a community of character. And I think you've got to analyze some Page 48 December 20, 2000 of that as well when you make these decisions. And honestly, I think you really need to take a look at some of these things. I'm not sure whether the anaerobic digestion system -- the numbers I saw was 200 tons per day, I think, and it sounded like there was 1,200 tons here coming in. So that doesn't necessarily take care of it all, but -- I'm also a space buff and I read a lot about the Apollo project, and I remember one of the engineers saying, you know, when they looked at how many millions of parts they had to get together to make this thing work, they didn't think -- some of them really didn't think they'd ever get to it go. And what they pointed out was just you attack it like a mouse attacks a big piece of cheese, you take a little bite. And I think if you look at biodiesel and you look at the landfill gas and you look at the anaerobic digestion, those are real solutions. Even though they may not take care of all of it, they're real solutions that start to take care of it, you know, one part of it at least for real. And again, I just hope you'll take a look at those things. Thank you. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Thank you. Thank you for being here. Next speaker? That my comments not be misconstrued, we will listen to any and all proposals that will help us get us through to find long-term solutions. What I personally object to is when you find a solution, one that has been deemed feasible, for people to come in with their own agendas who want to stop it, after we have done all the hard work to find the best solutions. Next speaker? MR. OLLIFF: Next speaker is Mike Delate, followed by Russell Tuff. MR. DELATE: Thank you, commissioners, for meeting out here in Golden Gate. I also would like to thank the staff and the commissioners for hiring the consultant, Malcolm Pirnie, who's been, I think from our perspective, an excellent independent reviewer of the whole situation, and have given, finally after a number of years, a report that I think has some substance to it, versus some of the reports in the past that have had a lot of doubtful information. That being said, I just wanted to clarify on a couple of points. Since I think Malcolm Pirnie has been frank on the landfill situation, I'm going to be frank with you. First, that the Page 49 December 20, 2000 potential for landfill odor generation, even though it would be greater if we keep on disposing waste at this site. If we stop disposing of waste at this site, 10 to 15 years from now the potential for odor generation is much more diminished. If we don't get a hold on the odor control situation right now, we keep on disposing waste here through expansion, 10 years from now we've got a greater potential of a greater odor problem than we have right now. Also, I want to be frank that this is not a threat or a warning, but I think the Commission needs to take into account when they look at these alternatives and the time frame that's involved and the steps to get the various permits that are needed that the citizens of this area will fight the County Commission each step of the way on the permitting process of any expansion at this landfill site. Keep that in mind when you look at your alternatives, because we will fight you. Thank you. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Thank you. Next speaker, please. MR. OLLIFF: Russell Tuff, followed by Charles Stokes. MR. TOFF: You would never believe I was from Minnesota, would you? But I'm not going to get into all the old stuff that happened, because we all know it and all the promises and all that good stuff. But I would like to talk about the last 90 days that I've experienced. And we did bring in Malcolm Pirnie. And I think it was November 14th he mentioned -- I didn't write that date down -- but we all met there and talked about issues that we had concerns on. And things that I didn't know of or wasn't aware of, but why does it always smell. You know, they talked about it was the largest per capita basis of diapers in the entire world, you know, because of the new babies and the old ones. We also had the two tons of dead animals dumped out here every two weeks. We had sludge from all these places that is not being properly disposed of. And so we came to a meeting and they didn't have any solutions. We're not sure what to do with about that. And I was like -- it was hard for me to believe that. And so then they had I believe it was a really good program which Malcolm Pirnie that they set up. And it was going to be one more time we'd review it and it could be put into action right Page 50 December 20, 2000 away. And all of a sudden, there's a report out, and we don't know -- there it is. And we weren't involved in it. So that's my first scare. I was at a meeting last week at the -- sorry, I'm freezing. But then we had a -- I was at the productivity meeting last week, and we put up -- I'm going to back up a little bit. You know, we had three years and so many months, 11 months or whatever, to make this. And all of a sudden we have new people come in and all of a sudden we have a crisis, we've only got two years and 11 months. And at the meeting -- and the odor control didn't happen. At the meeting last week they said okay, we have this crisis, we need to get rid of this garbage. And yet we're going to implement odor monitoring programs for like a year. And what his words -- this was their words, not mine, they're going to take the municipal waste out of county, and somebody said what does municipal waste mean? They said that's the smelly stuff. So we work on this and get this landfill old stuff out, and we take the stinky stuff out, and we're going to do an odor monitoring program that will work, because there's no more odors, and then we expand this landfill where it's at. And I'm scared to death that one more year from now we're going to smell, because they're going to bring all that stuff back. And I don't know why, I know there's -- it's a big contract, there's lots of money, but you can feel it, see it, sense it, that there's a big push to keep the landfill here. And we're hearing that we can solve this landfill problem. And I've heard best guesses used an awful lot. And by golly, I don't want any more best guesses. Let's get rid of it. And that's all I have. And I'm going to go home and warm up. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Okay, thank you, Russell. MR. OLLIFF: Next speaker is Andy Stokes, followed by Jack Pointer. MR. STOKES: Thank you. The last thing I ever thought I would do when I graduated 60 years ago from MIT, an eager young chemical engineer, was stand up on top of a damn landfill and freeze to death. COMMISSIONER HENNING: I agree, Mr. Stokes. CHAIRMAN CARTER: In a top coat. Page 51 December 20, 2000 MR. STOKES: While talking about the utter nonsense that you can't solve a landfill odor problem. Now, you folks are doing the right things. You're doing all of the right things. You've been a little slow at getting at it, but you are doing the right things. You want to hang in there, complete the work and get the problem solved. Now, I don't know whose fault it is, whether it's the county or the Waste Management, and I don't care, because you're in it together. I want to tell you that I have personal experience in the odor field in California where restrictions are just a little bit worse than they are here. How did we solve our odor problem? There are three golden rules at solving a problem, one -- odor problem. First thing you do is you eliminate all of the odor you consider at the source. Put the cork in the bottle. And to make sure that the cork doesn't leak, suck on the bottle. That's what you're doing. And suck real hard. We had a huge ocean-going oil barge loading oil in the Santa Barbara channel in sight of the Southern California, Santa Barbara University of Southern California branch. And you talk about sensitive, complaining people. What did we do? We put the barge under a vacuum. We then went around and tightened up all our hatches to make darn sure they could not leak, even when the vacuum wasn't there. And the next thing we did is we put monitoring in place so that we would know whether we were the source of the odor or not. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: That would be nice. MR. STOKES: And that is an absolute essential. If somebody three miles away complains about an odor, you better have a monitor in between the two of you so you know whether you had the odor or not. Well, you're going to do that. You've got some now. And these monitoring stations are about 10,000 bucks apiece, but that's cheap compared to the cost of losing your landfill. Now, Commissioner Carter, I regret to say, but I've said this to you before, you will never build a mass burn incinerator in this county. It just will not happen, and don't waste your time trying. In my considered judgment, the process is obsolete and the only ones ever to be built again will be built on an existing site like Lee County where they've already got one. And as Malcolm Page 52 December 20, 2000 Pirnie said, if you get a new piece of ground adjacent to it and try to build one on that, you probably couldn't do it. The only reason they can expand is they got enough land already to put an expansion in. But this process just is not the answer. Now, the project that we proposed 15 years ago has now been built. It was a more modern incinerator process, using front end separation, followed by a fluid bed combustor and boiler. This project has been built, it's in operation, it's a technical success and a financial failure. It's a financial failure because the contractor that got his neck out and put it in had the municipality's pledge to back the bonds. They took the pledge away and stuck the contractor with the debt. And he had to write it off. This is the Foster Wheeler Company. I have discussed this project with Foster Wheeler, would they build another one, and they said we're very doubtful if we would, and we never would build it on a bid. They have been burned so badly by counties all over the country, and this is true of all the waste vendors. The counties of this nation have been absolute busts at dealing with highly technical processes. They don't understand how to deal with this sort of thing, and continually the vendors have withdrawn from the field. If you put out an RFP tomorrow for an incinerator plant, you'd be lucky to get one vendor to bid. Now, all is not lost. There are really new technologies coming along. And you've heard little hints of them today. I can't say whether the Detroit Edison idea is a good one or not, but you've got to be impressed with Detroit Edison and listen to them. Now, the new things that are in your favor in respect to new technologies is there's a thing coming along called green energy, which in plain English means the utilities might pay you enough for power to make it worth while, because they can call it green power. And the other thing is that in a few years you will get carbon dioxide credits for what you do. But I must give you a caveat, that these things will not happen quick and easy. Counties are not used to dealing with new technologies. It's hard enough to do it in industry, and much harder in a county. So you must buy yourself a lot of time to do these things and look at them. Look at them and do them, if you can. You need more than five years to put a new technology in Page 53 December 20, 2000 place here to solve your problem of chewing up the garbage. Five years is an absolute minimum. So you must solve the odor problem. You must save this landfill and buy yourself time. You can always export your garbage, if you have to. But believe me, you will never ship it to Georgia in a railroad car. You will probably put it over in the Okeechobee landfill, which is enormous, and it would probably be a better deal. You can always do that. All you got to do is pick up the telephone and call the people and they'll beat a path to your door. So buy yourself time by solving this solvable problem, which you're already doing the right things on, and then look at these new technologies slowly and carefully. And don't buy any pigs in a.poke, buy something that you know will work. But it will take you time. Thank you. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Thank you, Dr. Stokes. MR. OLLIFF: Jack Pointer is the next speaker, followed by Dave Taylor. MR. POINTER: Good afternoon, commissioners. My name is Jack Pointer. I live in North Naples, about 10 or 12 miles north of here out of sight of this landfill. In Florida, it's said that the highest point in the state is about 350 feet above sea level. If we wait long enough, this point right here will probably be 350 feet above sea level and have the honor of being the highest point. I would like to suggest that the long-term answer to your particular question is do what they're doing up in Lee County and that is incinerate. It's going to take a long time to get such a thing built, but you've got other problems in the meantime. The long term is incinerate. I would also like to suggest to you don't consider electric generation. The electric utilities are doing that. It costs a lot of money to invest in electric generation. It's another business, one that we are not familiar with down here in the county, one which we are not skilled in and one which we should not go into. Thank you very much. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Okay, thank you, Jack. MR. OLLIFF: Dave Taylor will be followed by Steve MacKellar. MR. TAYLOR: I'm Dave Taylor. I've lived in Collier County Page 54 December 20, 2000 about 20 years. I'm just an ordinary citizen. I can't expect -- as an uneducated country boy with a low IQ, I can't compare to it the gentleman with his Ph.D. But I would like to ask one thing: How many of you commissioners have seen the plant in Lee County? Two out of five. How many people here have been up and seen that plant? Well, I went up there a year ago, and I don't know what happened, I got in on a day when they didn't have tours, and the business manager gave me a private tour of the whole thing. Now, I expected something to be really great up there, but I was absolutely dumbfounded at that plant. The gentleman said something about you can't get anybody to bid on it. Ogden Nash up there would be very happy to bid on one. I would suggest it's worth your time to go up. And I believe Mr. Henning was asking about pollution. Now, it's been a year since I've been up there. I don't know how it changed, but I can't think that it got any worse. They've always outdone us on recycling. They put in a new thing last year that they were -- everything that was going into the burn, they pulled out of that 36 tons a day of steel and 12 tons of non-ferrous metal. That's one percent and four percent of their intake. And they were selling that non-ferrous metal for 35 cents a pound. The -- we -- they are recycling -- or are recycling 40 percent, and I understand we're at 24. We're really at a very poor second. We can do better on that. And if it's composting or recycling, we should do it all. And I had one other thing. Us old guys got to kind of get this together. They were selling it for 35 cents a pound. Did I say $357 MR. STOKES: You said 35 cents a pounds. I said $35 a ton. MR. TAYLOR: Well, that would be better yet. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Well, whatever it is, that's fine. Your other thought, sir? MR. TAYLOR: Been talking on pollution. They told me up there that the -- they had two elements, and I can't tell you what they are; that they were up to 50 percent of what the government allowed. And those were the high ones. Every element they had was below 50 percent of the government allowance. And for people that say this won't work, we got one up here that you can Page 55 December 20, 2000 go and look at and see how it works. There's one up in Fernando County, up by Brooksville. The people where they were going to build it put up an awful fight. And they built it. No problem at all. It's operating, and no problem. They did the same thing up in Minnesota. The people around it just fought it tooth and nail. And now they don't even know it's there. It's operating. Speaking about selling your utilities, the utilities are stealing their power they're getting from these people, because they're captive, they can't sell them anyplace else. He told me they're getting about a third for their electric output that it's costing the utilities to make their own. But there's only one way to reduce your solid waste and that's to burn the darn stuff. And if you don't believe it will work, why go and look at some of these others, and they're working all over, Columbus, Ohio was one of the first to put one in, and they polluted something horrible. And they kept putting scrubbers in and cleaning it up and the thing works now and they've got no problems at all. There's a big one in Connecticut, the same way. It's the same story all over. But they've got it now where you don't have to put in that early period of the pollution, because they can put it in and build it right. Thank you. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Okay, thank you. MR. OLLIFF: Next speaker is Steve MacKellar, followed by Mildred Haylock. Neither one of which I think are here anymore. Ron Menville. CHAIRMAN CARTER: You are, for the record? Because we had three names. And you are? MS. HAYLOCK: Mildred Haylock. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Thank you. MS. HAYLOCK: Okay, hi, I'm a new resident to this county, and I love it here. And I've come for many years to appreciate it because I lived in Miami, right next to where the incinerator was. Never really knew what it was until I asked my husband one time what is that building right there, and he explained to me what it was. And I never heard (sic) any smells, never anything coming out of it, including smoke or anything like that, so I really believe that that's one good alternative for us here. Page 56 December 20, 2000 Now I'm only 1,800 feet north of the landfill, right here on Carlin Road, and it's very worrisome to me when I've been told by my neighbors and read in the paper that the landfill is going to expand north. Especially when my neighbors tell me that they've been kind of hassled at selling property to the county for the landfill, because they've been told that if they don't, they will build the landfill right to the back door of their backyard. Kind of threatening. And in that manner they've had -- some of them have selled (sic) their property and everything. So, you know, because they think that then their properties aren't going to be worth very much. Now, that's kind of a concern to me because I didn't really know about any of this until I came to the area and talked to some of my neighbors, going around greeting them and telling them and I was a new neighbor and everything. Now, this is my first meeting here, and it's kind of -- really nice that they did it on a nice day that is very sunny out and no smells, really, compared. Because when I wake up in the morning, I hear the trucks backing up and you smell it every day. And when you call the number to complain, which I heard in the radio which number to call and everything like that, nobody answers the number, nobody answers the telephone at all. Not once have I ever been able to complain, even though I have the right number, supposedly. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: I'm sorry to interrupt you, but Tom, do we operate that or does Waste Management operate that? MR. OLLIFF: Well, we have both a line available through the solid waste department and a line available through Waste Management. I'll get with her afterwards and find out what number she's got, because we do try and keep track of complaints, because we want to know from our perspective as well. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Actually, she's not the only person who I've -- MS. HAYLOCK: Not once have I ever gotten an answer. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Sounds like more than an isolated problem. MS. HAYLOCK: Now, I hear a lot of things that people are Page 57 December 20, 2000 talking about money. And yes, everything's going to cost money, but let's figure out this: I mean, if we wait one year from now, even 20 days from now, it's going to cost more money than if we started yesterday or two years ago, or if we started today to build -- or to change and to move this place, or to build the incinerator, which in my opinion is the best solution. So the longer that we wait, even to next August, is going to be a lot more money than what we're talking about today. So, you know, the quicker that we do this, the less money is going to cost the county and all of us paying the taxes. Now, house values, you know, home values. There's a lot of people that live here. And yes, maybe we're not rich like people that live on the beach that have those beautiful, rich, gorgeous homes and everything. But, you know, I'm sure if they had a big giant mound on the back yard of their property, they wouldn't like it very much, and their property wouldn't be worth as much as it's worth now. So I believe that they really got to consider everybody in the county, not just the people that are on the beach. Okay, also one thing which I didn't realize was that I woke up to a lot of noise in my backyard. Went to check to see what it was. This was about six months ago. And there's a big giant well equipment making big giant holes in the ground. Okay, I go talk and to the guy. I mean, this was going on for like three months. And I went and spoke with the guy. For a time the drilling and everything stopped and the machines just stayed there and I didn't know what it was, but it said drilling on the side. Finally when they came back, I went and spoke to the guy that was in charge, I guess, and he told me that they were building some kind of well, big well, for the water department. Now come to hear today, all this -- listening to everything that's going on, it's really not for the well department, because I'm guessing it's whatever they're doing to check the water and the facilities around the area. Now, this is only right on the corner of my property, you know, next property on over. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Ma'am, I don't know what this is, but it would not be tied into this workshop or these issues. We can check that out for you and I think Mr. Olliff would be happy to find out for you. Page 58 December 20, 2000 MS. HAYLOCK: No, what I'm trying to say is that there's a lot of things going on and really doesn't sound like, or I don't hear about it or read it in the newspapers or in the TV or anything like that, or none of this paperwork is being given to the neighbors around the area to tell them of what is really going on. It seems to me that is kind of going on underneath everything, rather than out in front. That's all I need to say. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Okay, thank you. MS. HAYLOCK: So I really believe that you all should check everything out. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Thank you. And if you have questions on the other, Mr. Olliff will be happy to try and answer them for you, MR. OLLIFF: I believe Ron Menville has left. The last speaker that I have registered is Vera Fitz-Gerald. And following Ms. Fitz-Gerald, I think we've got a short presentation from your productivity committee. And then Mr. Mudd will be happy to answer any questions and wrap up for you. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Vera's doing her bird watching today. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Any new species out there on that far hill, Vera? MS. FITZ-GERALD: Well, there's a bunch of Bald Eagles. Yeah, that's one of the reasons I came out here was because I said aha, I get to bird watch. I'm Vera Fitz-Gerald. I live in North Naples. I'm like Jack Pointer, I'm a long way away. You might be interested in the fact that not everybody hates dumps. We birders think they're fabulous places. And in fact, Brownsville, Texas dump is a tourist attraction, and thousands of people go out there every year to see the Mexican crow, which has a prettier name than Mexican crow, but I can't remember. So I was just talking to the manager here about birders coming out here. Anyway, the reason I really came out here to speak to you was because I wish that this county would be serious about recycling. I know you don't like to hear about things up north, but my husband has a home up north, and when we go up there, we recycle almost everything. Because that's the program the county has there. And it's hard for us to even have one bag of Page 59 December 20, 2000 garbage to take out a week. We usually only put it out every other week, because that's how little garbage we actually have left after we recycle everything. Here it's a major effort for me. The food trays you get from the grocery store, all you have to do is wash them, you can take them back to the grocery store. It's a nuisance, but I do it. And the plastic bags, I take them all back. I save all the cardboard. Think of the cardboard you have. Every cereal box, every coffee box. Everything comes in a cardboard box. But you can't recycle them here. It's crazy. So I have compartment boxes in the garage and I put my cardboard here, I put my styrofoam here, I put my plastic bags here, and then about a week or so I make my little rounds to the cardboard dumpster, and then I go back to the grocery store with all this stuff. And it's just ridiculous, because I know the average person will not go to this effort. And when I am gone for sometimes four months, by the time I get back -- I have a friend, by the way, who picks up my mail. She takes all the first class out and she sends it up to me. All the other stuff she throws in laundry baskets which I line up for her to do this. And I will have two heaping large laundry baskets of junk mail when I get back. And I can't put that in the recycle here. They don't take it. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: City of Naples you can. MS. FITZ-GERALD: Yes, that's what I do. I go through this stuff and then I get it in the car and down to the City of Naples I go with my junk mail. You can't throw magazines in the recycle, you can't throw catalogs. And how many catalogs? I mean, this is the time for catalogs. They come like this, stacks of them. Into this landfill they all go. It's silly that we don't recycle these things, because I think of the amount of garbage we would not being putting in this landfill if we did this. So that is what I want to see. I want to see more recycling. And you will be surprised how people will go to efforts to do this if they don't have to run all over the city to get rid of their stuff. So that's what I'm here for. And I thank you very much. And I wish you would really seriously consider expanding this big time. COMMISSIONER FIALA: How come the city does it and we don't, Pam? Page 60 December 20, 2000 COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Because it's not in our contract with Waste Management. But I bet it will be next time we -- MS. FITZ-GERALD: Well, I think we need to renegotiate that. COMMISSIONER COLETTA: Can we direct staff to look into that a little bit? CHAIRMAN CARTER: Well, I think if you look at the recommendations, it-- COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Yeah, it's one of them. CHAIRMAN CARTER: -- it's one of them there that we can incorporate. And Commissioner Coletta, I agree with you, we need to be better at that. COMMISSIONER COLETTA: Thank you. Item #2C PRODUCTIVITY COMMITEE COMMENTS CHAIRMAN CARTER: I understand that we have a report from our productivity committee? Also, I passed out what they had passed out for us when we were on break, a summary of their presentation this afternoon. MR. OTTO: Good afternoon. I see we're all snuggled up there and very comfortable. CHAIRMAN CARTER: We're huddled together for warmth. MR. OTTO: Anyway, if you're wondering why you're sitting here, you could probably blame the productivity committee. It was one of our member's ideas. So we're always on the job, guys. My name is Carl Otto -- CHAIRMAN CARTER: Isn't he up for reappointment? MR. OTTO: I hope so. My name is Carl Otto and I'm vice chair of the county productivity committee, which was created by this board, speaking on behalf of the 13 hardworking members of this committee. Pam, I remember you used to be part of it, Dr. Carter was, and we had a lot of fun. But anyway, we highly endorse the efforts of Jim Mudd, Dr. George Yilmaz and the committees, Malcolm Pirnie and his staff. We have had two detailed workshops on solid waste programs Page 61 December 20, 2000 with Jim George and Malcolm Pirnie, yielding the same conclusions that were presented today. And there's really no easy solutions to these problems. Solid waste has been on the productivity's committee's agenda since 1995 and has been one of our priorities since 1996. In our early studies of Collier landfills the farming ag. plastic was a concern, and it still is. Extending this life -- extending the life of the county's asset is in the best interest, we think, of the county's residents who pay the taxes. In the interest of productivity, our immediate concern is in the Collier County recycling effort. And I think it's been parroted a couple of times today. To our understanding, only 24 percent of our solid waste is recycled. Lee County estimates their recovery at about 40 percent. We need to do a better job here. And I think it's quite obvious now. That has a couple of impacts on what we're trying to do here, I think. Recycling by no means solves the county's landfill problem, but it could extend the useful life of these landfills. And just as an off -- I try to relate things and common sense maybe too frequently, but 16 percent is a big number. And when you look at the charts that we viewed here earlier, next year I think we're approaching 300,000 tons. That's -- I can't even visualize that as a number. When you look at 16 percent of that, you're talking close to 50,000 tons. And I still can't even get a concept of that number. But when you multiply that -- COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: That would be the increase -- MR. OTTO: Pardon me? COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: That's the increase, that's the spread between what Lee County recycles and what we recycle. MR. OTTO: And what we recycle. And when you multiply that by 2,000, you come up with an astronomical number called 100 million pounds? That -- all of a sudden I'm losing numbers. But if you go back to the -- you know, I kind of try to reduce things like that and say maybe a dump truck holds 30,000 pounds of stuff. We're looking at 3,000 dump trucks in front of us. Now, that starts to make a lot of sense to us. And that's a big recycling effort. And that means 3,000 dump trucks are now Page 62 December 20, 2000 going to be coming into this facility, which is quite meaningful. Extending the landfill usage is a practice of good management of the landfills. The productivity committee suggests the following to the Board of County Commissioners as our policy makers: One -- and I think these are important, and the committee also thinks so -- implement new policy that ensures recyclables are not mixed with household garbage; implement a full-scale recycling program for the communities in all counties, including the cities. I say that with prejudice. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: He's from Marco. MR. OTTO: Strengthen consumer education about recycling programs and their benefits. And I think that's important. Education is an important factor here. Number four, enforce harder compliance to county policy. Our message is short. We believe that Jim Mudd, Dr. George Yilmaz and Malcolm Pirnie are on the right track and need your full support. The ancillary programs that were talked about are ancillary technology of recycling, cornposting, waste remediation, C&D recycling, make good sense and it is really everybody's duty. Thank you very much. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Okay, thank you very much, George. Item #2D BCC DISCUSSIONS MR. OLLIFF: Mr. Chairman, we'd be happy to answer any questions. Or Mr. Mudd can, with brevity at a premium, wrap us up here, if he would. COMMISSIONER HENNING: Mr. Chairman, I have -- one question is somebody's going to have to convince me why it's going to take so long to open up another cell here at the landfill. The landfill is already permitted. I can't understand why it's going to take three years or more. CHAIRMAN CARTER: I'll direct that to Mr. Mudd or to Malcolm Pirnie to answer that. MR. MUDD: What you have to do, sir, is you have to go out and you have to permit the area, you've got to go through your Page 63 December 20, 2000 design phase to design the process, then you send your design in to get it permitted by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, and then you have to build it. The building part takes around 15 months. And then the other -- the other 20 odd some months that you have on the front end basically are your design process and your permitting process. We'd like to be able to speed that up as fast as we can. And again, that three-year time frame that was given to us by Malcolm Pirnie is an average time. That doesn't mean you can't push it to try to get it in there faster. If we can, we will. We would like to minimize the cost to the taxpayers of this county if we don't have to haul the trash out, and we could use this landfill for it instead. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Well, I concur with all of that, and I would like to suggest to the board that we accept the recommendations that have been made to us, that we establish a policy here within the framework of the periods that have been established by the consultant to staff, and that they come back to us on January 9th with some direction to the board as -- so that we might incorporate. Particularly if we look up here in the first one to three years what we have to get done, which really takes us to the next three to 15 years. That affords us the opportunity to do the things that we need to do and to getting the permitting done to open another cell here to maximize the space that we have. And paramount in all of this, though, is from now through whatever period it takes, this odor situation, that is primary in getting that resolved. And we need to know a specific plan and how that's going to be done. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: We need to see that January 9th. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Yeah, see that on January 9th. So what I'm suggesting is that's got to be incorporated as part of this. COMMISSIONER COLETTA: Commissioner Carter, would it be at all possible to maybe direct staff a little more exactly as far as possible elimination of one thing here and there would be a new landfill? COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: I'd certainly support that. CHAIRMAN CARTER: A new landfill, meaning? COMMISSIONER COLETTA: A new landfill -- Page 64 December 20, 2000 COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: COMMISSIONER COLETTA: within this county. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Oh, I would concur with that. agree. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: That's three. CHAIRMAN CARTER: That would be off the table. see any -- think that's a futile effort. New location. -- where we build a new landfill I would I don't COMMISSIONER COLETTA: Well, I see it listed there and I didn't want them wasting time on the direction that we're not interested in pursuing. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: That's a very good point. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Very good point. Is there anyone on the board that feels we want to site a new landfill in this county? I guess you take that one right off the picture. COMMISSIONER COLETTA: Is there anything else we might be able to narrow the scope on it to be able to give them directions? I had some ideas myself that I'd like to share with you, if I may. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Fire away. COMMISSIONER COLETTA: Thank you. I was thinking of maybe a hybrid of all these situations. We may be blessed a little bit by the situation that we are forced to move part of our waste stream out of the county. We're going to be able to see how easy this situation's going to be, how plausible it's going to be, how economical it's going to be first hand because we're forced to do it. While we're doing that, why don't we go ahead and construct those two cells that we're talking about and get them ready for whatever we may wish to do, and they'll be there in reserve in case of a hurricane, to be able to handle some of the processes that we don't want to send out, remove everything with recycling from the mix. Maybe have a dirty MRF to be able to take out all of the recyclables right here on location, come up with a mandatory recyclable in the county so we eliminate more. The dirty MRF will take care of the rest of it. We should be able to equal Lee County's direction in what they're doing at this point in time without any difficulty at all. That we see about increasing this carrying the waste out of the county. I think that Collier County is too beautiful a place to be looking at a 300 plus foot Page 65 December 20, 2000 landfill. What we could also do is dedicate maybe about 20 or 40 acres of the land in the surplus land that we have for special technology where these gentleman are coming up with these great ideas and at their own expense. They can take part of the waste stream and show us what they can do for composting, do for whatever else they want to work with, be it the ultra diesel fuel that they can develop. Then we can marry a bunch of these together to come up with something that will happen. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Well, I don't in any way want to -- I understand what you're suggesting, but I in no way want to tie the staff's hands at this point. I want to give them the broadest direction to come back with the best possible solutions. And I know what we have to do short-term. At least I have a pretty good understanding. I am not an advocate of continuing to take and shop out of this county because of the concerns from legal issues, from being held hostage by other landfill areas. I know temporarily we have to do it. At the same time, we'd like to find processes so we can do everything here within time frames. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Commissioner Carter, I'll just comment on what I heard Commissioner Coletta saying. Everything that he said comports with the recommendations for the short term and for the intermediate term. Because his expanding waste minimization, recycling program, that could -- CHAIRMAN CARTER: I concur with that. I don't have any problem with that. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: I like all of that. I like everything you said. The only piece that I'd like to keep open, I need more educating about the long term, about whether or not this waste to energy is the way to go or long-term -- or hauling on a long-term contract. COMMISSIONER COLETTA: If I may point out to you, we're not giving up anything by constructing the two pits that we're talking about there, the two cells. We have that in reserve at any point in time this doesn't work. We can immediately go back to it. We'll be using the cells to some degree during the whole process for whatever. I imagine the sludge is going to be something that hasn't been solved yet. There will be other things will probably be going in there. It Page 66 December 20, 2000 will take forever to fill them at that rate. But they'll be there. And any point in time that this doesn't work, we'd be able to turn right around and say that's it, go with a short-term contract with an option for a long-term contract, wherever we're going to go with it. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: You know, it sounds like what you're saying is let's do exactly what the recommendations say, except instead of concluding that we're going to do waste to energy for long-term, let's evaluate that, along with hauling. COMMISSIONER COLETTA: Right, exactly. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: And that's exactly where I was thinking, too, Mr. Coletta. COMMISSIONER FIALA.' Well, another question along that line. You're talking about the two cells. Could one of them be used just for the ash and the other one be used for things like the sludge? COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Well, eventually, if that's the way we end up, that's what would happen. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Well, I would defer to people who know far more about that than I do. MR. OLLIFF: Mr. Chairman, to try and help wrap this up a little bit, I think I hear some direction from the board that we ought to come back with whatever specific board actions are necessary in order to implement short and intermediate term solutions, and let the board give us some direction about that at that first meeting in January. Frankly, we're simply trying to get some decisions that get us out of what is a short-term issue and -- CHAIRMAN CARTER: I concur. MR. OLLIFF: -- frankly, buys us an intermediate amount of time. Long-term solid waste decisions don't have to be made, certainly not by January 9th. So if that's the concurrence of the board, we'll at least bring those action items back at that first meeting. CHAIRMAN CARTER: I would concur with that. I don't think Commissioner Coletta and I are too far apart on this. I am just very concerned, I never let go of the opportunity for my long-term waste management solutions by saying we'll do this. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Chosen one. Page 67 December 20, 2000 CHAIRMAN CARTER: Chosen one. And sometimes people get the idea that because we're shipping it out of here temporarily that we're not going to do the other. And I really look to do some innovative, creative and look to modern technology to get us to the long term. COMMISSIONER COLETTA: Keep the options open, right, Commissioner Carter? CHAIRMAN CARTER: All the options open. All the options open. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Well, that sounds like what you got there Tom is exactly what I hear, at least the three of us who are talking so far say that that's a good idea. MR. MUDD'. We still have the request for information that's out there, okay, and we're -- COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: What information? MR. MUDD: -- going to -- and we're going to -- COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: I'm sorry? MR. MUDD: Nor the new technologies, the request for information that -- where we got the advertisement out, we're still gathering that information, okay, and we still have to come back to the board to lay that process out, and we can get at those issues that -- CHAIRMAN CARTER: Right, and we don't have to do that by the 9th, as long as that's in the works, it comes forward to us in a timely manner. I don't want to see any board in the future caught where we are today, that they had their backs against the wall and said why didn't someone do really good policy setting and long-range planning that gave us the opportunity to look at options. I don't want to do that to anybody. COMMISSIONER HENNING: Mr. Chairman, just to ask staff, are we looking for directions on an intermittent term in January? CHAIRMAN CARTER: Short to intermediate. We're really looking from zero to 15 years. COMMISSIONER HENNING: I would like to throw out there that I think that we need to take a look at Waste Management's contract here at the landfill, not only on the odor problem but also the dollar figures. And there is I know in the contract is there's a fine fee in there, and I would like to know if we ever held any money back from Waste Management for not taking Page 68 December 20, 2000 care of the odor problem. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: But that would all be part of what's here under the short-term with the negotiating -- CHAIRMAN CARTER: Negotiated, revised and expanded -- COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: -- with Waste Management. CHAIRMAN CARTER: -- odor control program with Waste Management. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: But you're saying look at it a little more broadly. COMMISSIONER HENNING: Look at it -- I think that we need to look at it and find out whether we need to take care of it our solid waste here in the Naples landfill. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: So, okay. And I like that, too, because the second option or the second recommendation under the short-term is negotiate, revised and expanded odor control program with Waste Management. I'd like to just say negotiate, revise an expanded odor control program. And if they're the ones who can do it, so be it. MR. OLLIFF: Well, you need to understand, that's who we have a contract with right now. And I think our first option would be to sit down and try and renegotiate an agreement that does what the board wants it to do in terms of the management changes that Malcolm Pirnie has recommended and the odor control issues that we and Malcolm Pirnie agree need to be done here. But if than can't be successfully negotiated, then we'd be looking at other options. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: There you go. CHAIRMAN CARTER: Does that gift staff sufficient direction? All right. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Adjourn us, I beg you. CHAIRMAN CARTER: We're done. Page 69 December 20, 2000 There being no further business for the good of the County, the meeting was adjourned by order of the Chair at 4:00 p.m. BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS BOARD OF ZONING APPEALS/EX OFFICIO GOVERNING BOARD(S) OF SPECIAL DISTRICTS UNDER ITS CONTROL JAM~ CHAIRMAN :' .,, .~.~ ....',,,~,'/,) ,. -. ~:~T~i'eS:~"minutes approved by the Board on ~nu~r~/ ~ )-o0/, as presented or as corrected TRANSCRIPT PREPARED ON BEHALF OF GREGORY COURT REI~ORTING SERVICE, INC., BY CHERIE' R. LEONE, NOTARY PUBLIC Page 70