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BCC Minutes 02/07/1996 W (w/Landfill Siting Citizens Advisory Committee) WORKSHOP MEETING OF FEBRUARY 7, 1996, OF THE BOARD OF COUNTY COHMISSIONERS IN CONJUNCTION WITH THE LANDFILL SITING CITIZENS ADVISORY COHMITTEE LET IT BE REHEHBERED, 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 2 p.m. in SPECIAL WORKSHOP SESSION in Building "F" of the Government Complex, East Naples, Florida, with the following members present: COHMISSION CHAIRMAN: John C. Norris Timothy L. Hancock Timothy J. Constantine Pamela S. Hac'Kie LANDFILL SITING CHAIRMAN: Timothy J. Constantine Tom Henning Jim Stewart Mike Delate David Carpenter Nancy Bisbee Bradley Cornell Fran Stallings Jon C. Staiger Russell Priddy Barbara Jenkins ALSO PRESENT: Jo-Walter Spear John J. Wood Ronnie Dichio Christine H. Buonocore Kim Rodgets Boyd David Wilkison David C. Weigel, County Attorney CHAIRMAN NORRIS: Let's get started. MR. STAIGER: The chairman of our committee is Mr. Constantine. CHAIRMAN NORRIS: Okay. COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: I'll gladly defer to our chairman but CHAIRMAN NORRIS: Go right ahead. COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: I understand we've just got a couple of housekeeping items before we start with the actual workshop, and that is, has everybody on the committee had a chance to see the minutes from the last time around? Are there any additions or corrections? MR. PRIDDY: Move approval. MS. BISBEE: Second. COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: Motion and a second. Any discussion on that? Seeing none, all those in favor, state aye. Motion carries. And is there anything else we need to do before we get into the meat of this meeting? MR. PRIDDY: I would request that near the end we have a brief discussion on the spokesperson. COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: Coming from our spokesperson, Russell Priddy, our spokesperson. You're not going to weasel out of this. MR. CARPENTER: He just doesn't want his address or phone number published. COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: Jo, who is going to do the -- kind of the overview for us? MR. SPEAR: David. COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: David's working the media right now. I think we're ready. Do we need to use microphones for the people in the audience? I don't know if everybody -- A couple of folks are nodding. That may help, at least for the -- I don't know if we all have them but at least for your presentation. MR. WILKISON: Can you hear me? UNKNOWN VOICE: Use the mike. MR. WILKISON: I don't think I need one. I usually don't need to. COHMISSIONER HAC'KIE: You've got that kind of voice. MR. WILKISON: I thought the first thing we would do is -- THE COURT REPORTER: Excuse me. Could you state your name for the record? MR. WILKISON: Yeah. For the record, David Wilkison, Wilkison and Associates, Dufresne-Henry Team. And when you get to that, I thought it would be helpful if everybody on the committee also introduce themselves, also part of the consulting team. Tom, if you could start it and who you represent. MR. HENNING: Tom Henning representing district three commission. COHMISSIONER HANCOCK: Tim Hancock, commissioner of district two. MR. STEWART: Jim Stewart. I represent the Golden Gate Area Chamber of Commerce. CHAIRMAN NORRIS: John Norris, commissioner of district one. MR. DELATE: Mike Delate, Golden Gate Estates. COHMISSIONER HAC'KIE: Pam Hac'Kie, commissioner of district four. MR. CARPENTER: David Carpenter, East Naples Civic. COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: Tim Constantine, commissioner of district three. MS. BISBEE: Nancy Bisbee, Golden Gate Estates area. MR. CORNELL: Brad Cornell on behalf of Collier Audubon Society. MR STALLINGS: Fran Stallings, Florida Wildlife Federation. MR STAIGER: John Staiger, district four. MR PRIDDY: Russell Priddy, district two. MS JENKINS: Barbara Jenkins, district five. MR SPEAR: Jo Spear, CH2H Hill, Dufresne-Henry team. MR WOOD: John Wood, CH2H Hill, Dufresne-Henry team. MR DICHIO: Ron Dichio, Wilkison and Associates, Dufresne-Henry team. MS. BOYD: Kim Boyd, Boyd and Company, Dufresne-Henry team. MS. BUONOCORE: Christine Buonocore, Boyd and Company, Dufresne-Henry team. MR. WILKISON: Thank you. This is meeting number 13 of the citizens advisory committee with the Dufresne-Henry team. I think the committee's met probably 16, 17 times since probably Hay, April of 1995. The purpose of this meeting today is to identify the highest rated sites of the 46 candidate sites that were identified earlier. There is a map right here if anybody would like to go take a look. What we'd like to do today is -- is I'm going to give a real brief overview of the process that we've been through. And right after that, the committee members are going to talk about the history of the committee and the processes that they went through, talk about exclusionary criteria, evaluative criteria, the criteria weighting. And then the consulting team will talk about the criteria measurement and the actual rating that was done on the site. MR. WOOD: David, can you move that chair? It might help people see better. MR. WILKISON: Back in, I think, early 1995 the county commissioners chose to form a citizens advisory committee whose purpose it was, as stated on the overhead, to identify and locate a site for the future landfill and materials recovery facility for Collier County. Subsequently after that in -- it was about July of 1995, the Dufresne-Henry team was hired by the county to assist the citizens advisory committee in their effort, and one of the first things that was identified is that public involvement is the key to successful landfill siting, and we have met at various locations throughout the county. We've had an established public comment period at each meeting. We have distributed all the information that has been given to the committee members throughout the public library system in Collier County and also through several facilities here on the Collier County campus. We have issued two press releases in addition to several advertisements in the Naples -- Naples Daily News advertising each meeting. We prepared a public information brochure which if you'd like a copy, you don't have one, see Kim Boyd. And we have some presentations that are planned with the Chamber of Commerce at one of their good morning, good business meetings in March. Is that right? And we're also going to talk to the Economic Development Council's natural resources subcommittee. This is kind of a flow chart that I'll go through rather quickly that -- I apologize for this. The overhead is not fitting very well -- that kind of establishes the process by which we went through. And we've talked about this before, and Russell Priddy gave a presentation to the commissioners about two months ago about this very thing, and this is kind of a second part of that. I'm going to skip these because they're not showing up very well. And that's actually the last part. And, please, if anybody in the audience has any questions about the process or anything, see me or anybody on our team. We will be happy to explain it in detail to you. And the real key to this whole process is that the committee up until today -- or, actually, until the last meeting when they were presented with a map that showed the 46 sites, went through this process and developed all the information map-blind. When I say "map-blind," that is the only map that they've ever seen. Actually, we have one that we brought to the committee meetings that was -- that had less information on it than that. But it's really a map-blind process, and that is one of the keys to the defensibility of the process and -- COMHISSIONER CONSTANTINE: David, could you explain a little bit why that is so important? MR. WILKISON: Well, as you're establishing criteria that -- avoidance criteria for landfill siting, it's important that they be based on your social concerns, community concerns, not concerns that, hey, if I -- if I establish this criteria and I'm sitting here looking at a map at the same time, if I establish that criteria, then I can keep it out of my back yard, or I can keep it away from my house. So that -- that's the key to really -- A defensible process is doing it in the map-blind. And the next part of today's meeting we would like Barbara Jenkins, one of the committee members, to talk about the first process that we went through with the committee which was the exclusionary criteria development. MS. JENKINS: Okay. For the record, my name is Barbara Jenkins, and I was chosen by Commissioner Matthews to represent district five. One of the first tasks assigned to the committee was to develop exclusionary criteria. And on the overhead that we've put up here, it explains exactly what exclusionary criteria is, which is a criteria that prohibits a potential area from further consideration as a candidate area. Exclusionary criteria reflects federal, state, and local regulatory requirements in the policies of Collier County. To get the process started, committee members were provided with copies of the rules and regulations established by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Bureau of National Affairs. The majority of the exclusionary criteria the committee developed was a result of restrictions already placed by these agencies. Some restrictions were not applicable to Collier County, such as seismic impact zones, so it was not necessary for a committee to include them as exclusionary criteria. Once a criteria was identified, it was cataloged as it pertains to an issue. Here is an example of one of our exclusionary criteria. Each criteria was cataloged by issue, objective criterion, suggested data sources, and proposed measurement methology. This information was prepared on the yellow form for discussion and group consensus. Once consensus was reached, the information was transferred to a blue form and presented to the Dufresne-Henry team. Using this information, they were able to eliminate certain areas in Collier County from the landfill search area. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Can I ask a question? MS. JENKINS: Sure. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: What -- What was the consensus? It seems to me that either it's prohibited or it's -- prohibitive or not. What -- What did you mean "reach consensus"? MS. JENKINS: Well, not every issue was -- Not every issue was restricted by federal and state government. There were some social issues which -- as we get through this, you'll see what they were. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Okay. MS. JENKINS: Here's the seven exclusionary criteria that we came up with. Five of the seven were already restricted by federal or state regulation, and the other two were developed by the committee. One of them, national and state parks and preserve criteria, was actually made an exclusionary criteria because we went out -- or we had representatives go out and talk to the state and federal agencies and see if they would be willing to sell, swap, or lease land because the county cannot take that land, and we were told that there was no way that a state or federal agency would swap, sell, or lease land to site a landfill. So we made that exclusionary criteria knowing full well that we would not be able to site a landfill in those areas. And the second area that the committee as a whole felt was very important was residential areas. We believe that the citizens of Collier County did not feel it was in the best interest for a landfill to go in residential areas. So we just made that an exclusionary criteria from the beginning. Once the exclusionary criteria was established, the information was then turned over to the consultant team, and the consultants then mapped that information and made that -- and -- and scaled down the landfill search area, and each of these slides show you exactly what each of these criteria excluded. The first one is airports. So they blocked out all the airports in Collier County. The second one was unstable areas, and there are no unstable areas in Collier County. So that's why there were no additional blockouts on this particular map. The third one was park lands, and you can see that took quite a bit of the county once we marked that off. Community water wells was the next criteria. MR. WOOD: That was potable water wells. MS. JENKINS: Oh, sorry. Potable water wells. Then community water wells. MR. WOOD: Then community water wells. MS. JENKINS: Community water wells. Is that it? Class one surface waters -- again, there was no class one surface waters in Collier County. MR. WOOD: Urban -- MS. JENKINS: And the last one was urban and residential areas. And in closing, I'd just like to say, even though this is a short presentation, it took us a long time to reach this point. Not everybody had the same feeling, and we all had to come together as a group to develop this exclusionary criteria. In the end, we had to hold extra meetings because -- to keep us on schedule and avoid delay in this process. And I would like to thank the consulting team and county staff for keeping us focused, on schedule, and providing us with the information and materials that we needed. Anything else? COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Just -- I have a question on number four. I thought that this map, the one that's on the board over there, was the sites that survived the cut of exclusionary criteria. COMHISSIONER HANCOCK: You haven't seen all the cuts yet. COMHISSIONER MAC'KIE: Well -- But -- But, like, how does this Sabal Bay stay in? When I put this map on top of that one, doesn't it cancel it? Doesn't cover it up? MR. WILKISON: No. It was -- COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: It will in the process but it isn't -- COHMISSIONER HAC'KIE: It's not urban? MR. WOOD: It's a different scale, Dave. MR. WILKISON: There's a different scale on that. The last exclusionary criteria was urban residential as defined by the future land use map, and actually that area of the county does not fall under urban residential. COHMISSIONER HAC'KIE: It's in the fringe, I guess. MR. WILKISON: Yes. COHMISSIONER HAC'KIE: Urban coastal fringe. MR. WILKISON: Coastal fringe, yes. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Okay. MR. WILKISON: Marco Island, that's another example. Thank you, Barbara. MS. JENKINS: Thank you. MR. WILKISON: Jon Staiger is going to present the next part of today's presentation, and he's going to talk to you about the development of the evaluative criteria. MR. STAIGER: Actually, I think Fran is going to talk about the evaluative criteria. MR. WILKISON: Okay. MR. STAIGER: Site definition rules I think -- who's got the transparencies for that? Fran? Are they right there? Okay. COMHISSIONER MAC'KIE: Silly place to hide them. MR. PRIDDY: You did have them before you got up and moved. MR. DICHIO: Jon, how about moving that overhead closer to the screen? That way you should be able to get most of those things on the screen. COMHISSIONER MAC'KIE: You're the one with the engineering degree. MR. DICHIO: Actually, I have a business degree. MR. STAIGER: The sort of next level of -- of cut in this process involves defining what would be a candidate area. Now, we've already looked at exclusionary rules. What we're talking about here is basically the common sense cut. You can't put a landfill somewhere where you've got it -- on both sides of U.S. 41, for example. You don't want to have it on two sides of a -- of a wetland. That would -- would never get permitted. So this -- this set of definitions was basically put into the system to -- to further filter out obviously non-permitable or non-functional sites. The candidate area definition -- and I believe there's a map that shows those. MR. PERKINS: Use the mike, please. MR. STAIGER: Yes. The candidate area -- MR. PERKINS: Turn it on. MR. STAIGER: The candidate area definition is basically all of those areas in -- or the candidate areas would be anything in the area that's not colored on the map, and then the next phase was the evaluative criteria which deals with ranking sites in that thing. What -- What's -- What's our next transparency? MR. WOOD: That's exclusionary. This is the second issue which was area of critical state concern. MR. STAIGER: Those are all areas of critical state concern in here that are defined by DEP and further eliminate clear space. So when we look at the -- I think the final -- the final cut -- and that's the map that those sites fits on, you can see where if you eliminate exclusionary -- excluded areas and then you eliminate areas with the candidate definition, you don't have very much space left, and that's basically where the mappets then look for sites that -- that fit in the -- in the definition of the -- of the rule. I don't -- I'm just trying to see. We've got this -- the site definition rules which include the areas we have -- the size of the -- of the landfill -- COMMISSIONER HANCOCK: Jon, I'd like -- I'd like to go back to the last one you had up. It referred to interconnected wetlands. Depending on who you ask, someone would say every wetland in Collier County is interconnected, and others would say there are greater pockets of isolation. So how did you arrive at establishing interconnectivity to exclude sites? What was the criteria there? I mean, obviously -- MR. STAIGER: I would have to defer on that to the team because they were the ones who applied it to the map. I don't know how they came up with -- with the particular mapping. I think that was -- that was basically looking at major flow-ways down through -- COMMISSIONER HANCOCK: Some of which have been severed. MR. STAIGER: Yeah. COMMISSIONER HANCOCK: I'm just curious -- MR. STAIGER: I don't -- I'd have to defer to -- I'd have to defer to Dave. MR. SPEAR: Jon, what we did was to instruct the mappets -- Jo Spear. We instructed the mappets utilizing a CAD program to connect all of the lines that touched that would represent a contiguous polygon indicated as a wetland on the NWI map. COMMISSIONER HANCOCK: And the NWI map is based on data MR. SPEAR: National Wetlands Inventory by the -- COMMISSIONER HANCOCK: How old is that data? MR. SPEAR: It's probably -- John. MR. WOOD: '94. MR. SPEAR: Yeah. '94. COMMISSIONER HANCOCK: That takes a big chunk of areas out, and some of these areas I think we know have been severed that are no longer functioning as a continual system or continuous systems. So I -- I have to raise a level of concern of the amount of area that's excluded by this criteria because the NWI map I don't think is a ground-truthing -- is based solely on ground-truthing where you determine if a wetland area has been isolated or severed. So I -- I'd like to know a little bit more about how NWI arrived at that because I'm -- Just some of these areas that have been excluded here, I -- I personally question their -- their value as a continual wetland from start to finish. It just doesn't ring true. MR. SPEAR: It's the best data available for a desk-top study, and I think we all have to realize that at this point in the study is desk-top. COMMISSIONER HANCOCK: But at this point we're excluding it, so it will receive no further study based on this information. MR. SPEAR: That's correct. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: So -- So maybe -- I think what I hear Commissioner Hancock saying -- and I find myself agreeing -- is it might not be the best choice to make to say that we are going to only consider desk-top siting criteria. I mean, we do live here. We have some actual knowledge. COMMISSIONER HANCOCK: I -- I agree with the connected wetlands. That makes complete and total sense. But I -- I -- I question whether that is, in fact, all connected wetlands that have been excluded, and I would hate to see a certain number of sites excluded based on desk-top information that the local knowledge may show us is not true. I raise that as a concern and nothing we can do about it today. MR. PRIDDY: I -- I would -- I would have that same concern, but I -- I think that if you look further down the -- down the process, that while -- even if it's not connected, it's probably not permitable because it is -- you know, a wetland's going to run across some other permitability criteria that would -- would exclude it. One of the -- One of the rules that we ran across was we were permitted to take 50 acres of wetlands and -- and, you know, that was okay. And I think you would find that while the system may have been severed, to go in and take more of that probably would not fall out as a candidate area. COMHISSIONER HANCOCK: But -- MR. PRIDDY: Anyway, but it is a legitimate, you know, question and -- and concern there. MR. STAIGER: Yeah. There was a substantial amount of discussion on the committee as to what sources of data to use that would be available, and the National Wetland Inventory was considered the most -- the most recent and at least reliable information without having to go out and spend a great deal of money in the field actually ground-truthing. That -- That was the reason for it, and simply those data are -- are relatively current and -- and available. The -- The -- I don't know if you'd call it the next step, but the -- the step that was next in the process as far as what the committee dealt with was coming up with a way to define sites so that they could be applied to the mapping and come up with a -- a -- a set of -- of rules that the mappets will apply in the blind to all of this stuff that was left after we excluded or whatever and they -- I don't want to run through this whole list, but basically the site had to be big enough to contain the necessary disposal area but not enormously large beyond it, the disposal area, the necessary buffer, et cetera. The -- We didn't want to have sites that overlapped one another so much that we just basically had one continuous site with little pieces that overlap. So there was a -- The sites were not to be overlapping. The buffers which are around the disposal site could overlap. In the site selection process, we wanted to keep them away from state or county roads, not impede or impact streams and the like. The -- There's several pages of these things. The -- We didn't want to have a disposal site that overlapped into an area of critical state concern, et cetera, and '- COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Jon, I have a question. MR. STAIGER: Yo. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: The one before it said the site must be permitable. A question that I've had that -- that I -- that I feared dealing with is, what are the agencies -- what are the odds that an agency is going to say to us, "You don't have a permitable site in Collier County as long as you have capacity on an existing landfill"? Is that factored into the question of whether or not a site is permitable? MR. STAIGER: I don't think the agencies are in a position to -- to deny you a permit simply because you have available room in the landfill. What -- What we dealt with in permitable is if you plant the thing right in the middle of a -- an enormously productive wetland system, you aren't going to get a permit. If you put it too close to an airport, you aren't going to get a permit. There are FAA concerns, DEP, EPA, Corps of Engineers, and -- and that was the thing. I don't know if Fran has a comment about that. MR. STALLINGS: My understanding of the situation is -- is that the present landfill will be weighed relative to potential sites, and that what we have to show is the potential site for a new landfill is a better site than the existing landfill. COHMISSIONER HANCOCK: And by using some of this criteria, we're establishing today we can probably show a better score of a future site than if we were to judge the current site by existing criteria? Is that a fair statement? COHMISSIONER HAC'KIE: Especially when residential proximity is exclusionary, you know, if that -- if that -- if that throws it out. MR. STALLINGS: Yeah. This -- This process gives us a logical, rational defensive or defendable basis for saying this site is better than that site is better than that site and helps provide us with the data that we need to present to regulatory agencies. COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: And the other thing to keep in mind, what we've tried to select by all this criteria is something that would have, like, a 50-year life. So whether we were to move nine years from now or 19 years from now, it's still going to serve a long-life purpose beyond. COHMISSIONER HAC'KIE: Okay. Thanks. MR. STAIGER: Yeah. As far as the -- the remaining definition rules, it's acknowledged in the -- in the process that you can take up to 50 acres of wetland. Anything -- You can take ten acres without any problems or at least with minimal difficulty to do something like this. To go from ten to 50, every acre requires a certain amount of mitigation, and the committee decided that that mitigation could and should take place in the buffer between the actual disposal area and the border of the site itself. Also, that if there is a relatively minor road that would be -- would need to be rerouted around this thing that was not a state highway or an arterial county road, that could be rerouted as part of the process, but we did not want to plant this thing where it had to reroute any -- any major county road. These are the -- This is the remainder of the -- of the definition rule, and also that the -- the height of the landfill is -- is basically limited to 125 feet. And these are the candidate sites. Now, I think we want to get into evaluative criteria which is what Fran would talk about. MR. PRIDDY: While he's going up, I'd like to make a comment for the Board of County Commissioners' benefit. I personally feel like that all that we look at, we did not get into any political criteria or -- or weren't concerned with political things, and whether the land -- whether -- whether the efforts of our work ever get used didn't matter. We went through the process with -- You know, we were going to identify this site. Whether the landfill gets moved in ten years or 100 years had no effect on the outcome of -- of our efforts. So it wasn't -- Y'all -- Y'all will have to handle the political aspect of it, and the heat's going to get turned up over the next few months but -- COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: The sole purpose was to find an appropriate, permitable site. MR. PRIDDY: And -- And the others can comment on that, but don't think that we got political in the process at all. COHMISSIONER HANCOCK: Russell, I think it's also important to understand because I -- you know, obviously going through this and this really being the first presentation where we've had a chance to have some meaningful discussion, I'm going to have a lot of questions, and I don't want anyone on the committee to take those questions as a did-you-do-your-job question but just more clarification. So please don't take any offense if -- if -- if -- you know, of the questions I have. They're really just seeking information. So I want to say that from a defensive posture that I appreciate the work you've done. I'm going to have some questions, but, you know, wait -- wait until we're all done before you throw things at me. MR. PRIDDY: And I think you all should, and I think the questions you've raised so far are legitimate and appropriate. MR. STALLINGS: For the record, Fran Stallings here, and I'm going to talk about the evaluative criteria which is where we get into a situation where you look at the degrees of difference. And just to kind of underscore a little bit what Russell was saying, there was no particular individual nor perspective or interest that drove the committee. It was a committee that, I think, functioned with the reality of the situations that we faced in mind and with the practicality of permitting the landfill site. So in that sense I'm proud of the way the committee went about it. First of all, an evaluative criteria is a criteria that enables a potential area to be evaluated against other potential areas within the limits of a particular issue or community concern and that these evaluative criteria do reflect community concerns relative to siting a proposed facility within the community as well as some other factors. The issues that came before us in looking at the -- The issues that came before us in looking at the evaluative criteria are things like potable water wells, hauling costs, truck traffic, how many property owners you have, residential buffers, threatened and endangered species, groundwater quality, and a variety of other issues here, and these are basically some of the factors that you have to weigh to come up with some kind of a ranking of the different sites relative to each other. And I think one of the very, very important jobs of the committee was to sit down and assign some values to these things, and that's how we came up with these evaluative criteria. Yes? COHMISSIONER HAC'KIE: Just a comment about that, that I -- I assume there was some sort of balloting process or something was how you came to -- came to rank them, and I guess I want to just tell you that I have a question about cost being so low in the ranking. I'm surprised that cost is not a higher consideration. COHMISSIONER HANCOCK: Commissioner Hac'Kie, if I may add, there are about seven on here I have questions on. And -- and, Dr. Stallings, were you going to kind of take them one at a time? MR. STALLINGS: Yeah. I thought I would work down the list here -- COHMISSIONER HAC'KIE: Perfect. MR. STALLINGS: -- and I don't know that I really have a good answer to you as to why cost was down near the bottom of the list, but it's one of the factors that ultimately has to come into consideration when you start selecting sites. I think when you have a site that falls out or several sites that fall out at about the same place, that's where you really begin to look heavily at the -- at the cost. But the -- the study team, if they want, can explain in greater detail how we came up with these particular ratings, but it was a voting process where everyone sat down together and started voting and discussing it until finally we came to a consensus. MR. STAIGER: Just an additional comment on this -- this list of evaluative criteria. The committee members representing the various commission districts, I think, were very conscientious in -- in finding out from their constituencies what kinds of things were of importance to the communities. So that this list didn't just reflect the imagination of this community. It reflected input from other residents of their commission districts. And the process of going from a simple two- or three-word description to something that everybody on the committee was -- was comfortable with sometimes took two or three or four meetings. We would define these things, think about it, have the team see if that particular criterion would work, and if -- if there was a need to change it or -- or change its -- its character to make something that would separate sites, and some of these things were eventually combined. Some of them were totally eliminated. So this -- this was a -- A major part of this long process we went through was tuning these things to be something that -- that the committee was -- of consensus was meaningful, and so this -- this was not just a little list that got handed to us by the consulting team. This was a list that was created by the committee with a great deal of time spent in trying to -- to define these things carefully and -- and fine-tune them. MR. STALLINGS: Well, Commissioner Mac'Kie, you asked a minute ago whether or not there was any site, I believe, that would be permitable in the whole county, and I think that's the reason for a number of the things that you see on here and their relative rankings, is that we had to take those things into consideration to come up with something that is permitable, and we also at the same time wanted to take into consideration the people problems. So it's sort of a combination or a melding together of those two things. And we realize that no particular site is going to be absolutely perfect. There's going to be somebody who doesn't like it. But we do have to come up with something that has the minimal human impacts and at the same time is permitable, and it's a formidable task, and, you know, that's what we were trying to accomplish. If you like, I can sort of run down the list here. Notice that the top ranking thing on the -- for the evaluative criteria is residential buffers. So that's certainly a people thing, and the idea is that you want to isolate this facility as much as possible from adjoining neighborhoods or whoever might be living in the vicinity. The second one was community water wells. That was a number two priority, and that's certainly recognizing that we all need a good clean water supply. And we do know that the landfills upon occasion do tend to leak. I think it's more of a question of when they do it, not if. We fortunately have some methodology that we can deal with that with, deal with the -- the leakage. You put a well of rings around them and -- a ring of wells around the landfill so -- Anyway, the next thing was Rookery Bay, Henderson Creek drainage basin. I think that was in recognition of several things. One would be the difficulty of permitting something there, and the other is the value of the marine resources to the economy of the area. Commissioner Hancock. COMMISSIONER HANCOCK: Two questions on that. I assume Rookery Bay and Henderson Creek were chosen because they are, in essence, the county's outfalls into the estuarine system? I mean, they are the two main basins that most of the county drains through? Is that -- MR. STALLINGS: No. I don't think that would necessarily be the case, but it is the national estuarine research reserve -- COMMISSIONER HANCOCK: Right. MR. STALLING: -- and there's a sensitivity associated with that, and Henderson Creek is the number one source of freshwater for that facility. COMMISSIONER HANCOCK: Okay. My question lies in the word -- by saying "protection of," and you talked about obviously we don't want to locate this in either of those basins. But by saying "protection of those," are we saying zero impacts for water quality? What does "protection" mean? MR. STALLINGS: Well, these things are relative. So, in other words, if we take a look at a site and let's say the sites rank roughly equal in other aspects, but one is right adjacent to Henderson Creek, then that one would get a lower rating than the other one. So these are things that are sort of relative to each other, and you just have to put all of these things together and -- to try to come up with something that makes sense. COMMISSIONER HANCOCK: Okay. COMMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: One of the other things too, as you look at each of these 23 items, there is a sheet -- an individual sheet in our book that's in the commission offices that breaks down a little more. So as you look over here and it says "protection of," that doesn't tell you very much, but we have a full one-page sheet on every one of the 23 items which gives a little more definition to it. COMMISSIONER HANCOCK: It's so much easier just to ask. MR. STALLINGS: Moving on down the list, we have potable water wells, and the difference between potable and community water wells -- they're actually both potable water wells -- is that here it's private water wells. So that's the difference between the two. Ground and surface water quality are both listed here, and the idea was that we have to protect to the maximum extent possible our ground and surface water quality, that we look at recharge areas and areas where you could have better treatment in some places than others. The next is rare, unique, and endangered natural areas, and one of the reasons that these things got a high rating in addition to the fact that, you know, some people consider them more important than other people do is that we again are fighting this permitting battle. So we were just trying to be as practical as we could because we don't want to come up with certain sites here that there's just no way we're going to get permitting. So we just had to build in a mechanism here that took those things into consideration. Sensitive receptors would be things like schools, hospitals, and so forth. So we want to avoid -- to maximize the distance away from such receptors. Compatibility with adjacent land use is another one of the evaluative criteria. COHMISSIONER HANCOCK: Have we determined what a landfill is compatible with yet? MR. STALLINGS: Well, that -- that's a tough one. You know, it's certainly a nimby if there ever was one and not in my back yard. They were teasing me before the meeting and saying they were going to gerrymander the county line and put it in my back yard in Bonita Springs. COHMISSIONER HAC'KIE: Yeah! COHMISSIONER HANCOCK: Can we put that on the agenda? MR. STALLINGS: Okay. Moving on down the list here, wetland vegetation cover, again representing permitting problems, threatened and endangered species in terms of the number of different species. For example, if we took the single species like panthers and said we can't put it in panther territory, you probably wouldn't have much of anyplace to put it. They recently found one wandering around on the west side of U.S. 41 up in Lee County near the Estero River. So about everywhere you have one of those critters. But if we take it to look at the number of different species, then that gives us a better index to measure it by and tells us something about the ease or difficulty of the permitting. Panther avoidance -- and I think this one was aimed specifically at in areas and areas that are very highly frequented. And, again, it's something that will ease the permitting problems. Same thing with hydric soils. On-site residences -- obviously we don't want to impact any more residences than we have to. Hopefully we wouldn't have to impact any. COHMISSIONER HANCOCK: I want to go back to hydric soils. I -- I have to ask. If you're looking at wetland vegetative cover and hydric soils, are we being redundant? COHMISSIONER HAC'KIE: Yeah. COHMISSIONER HANCOCK: Let's face it. The permitting -- Although you have to show hydric soils, the existence or non-existence in the permitting process, many times where the vegetation has left and hydric soils are not present, they still show up on the 1950 version of the NRCS soil survey so you know -- MR. STALLINGS: I think what you've done is put -- put your finger on the problem, and the reason for doing this -- if you have wetland vegetation there, nobody is going to quarrel with whether it's a wetland or not, but there are quite a few areas that were wetlands at one time and still have hydric soils. Fortunately or unfortunately hydric soils are one of the things that the permitting agencies look at pretty carefully. So if you have two sites and one has a lot of hydric soils and one doesn't, the one that doesn't is going to be much easier to permit, or assuming that you could permit either one of them, the one with the hydric soils is probably going to require considerably more mitigation. COHMISSIONER HANCOCK: And the NRCS, the soil survey, how old is that? I remember using one from 1951. That's why I'm asking. MR. STALLINGS: Yeah. I think -- MR. DELATE: 1980s. COHMISSIONER HANCOCK: 1980s now? Ooh, we're moving. MR. STALLINGS: Well, we -- we -- you have to have ground-truthing in this, and we're not going to make the judgment on the basis of a ten-, 15-, 20-year-old map as to whether or not it has hydric soils or wetlands. You -- You have to go out and look at the site and do the site visits. So, in other words, this is a process that starts out general and becomes more specific as you go along and as you narrow down onto the sites. Airport avoidance is another. We've already had airports listed, but the purpose here is to get as far away as you can from airports. So, in other words, if you are just over the line from an airport, that's not as good a situation as if you're 20,000 feet or several -- you know, ten, 15 miles away from an airport. Predatory and scavenger birds. Again, recommending -- representing some of the permitting problems here, that if you have a bird rookery and you're going to put a landfill near it, you're going to bring a lot of predatory birds in just by the advent of the landfill as an attractor for the birds, and this could cause then those predatory birds to go over and do in the ones that are nesting. And, again, I realize this is not at the top of some people's list, but, again, we were looking at the reality of trying to get something permitted and to make it as easy as -- as we possibly could. Farm fields and citrus groves. There was a concern on the part of the committee members that we have a process going on in the United States where we are continually using up agricultural land for one thing or another. That use-- using up of agricultural land is tended to be offset by an increasing efficiency of agricultural production, but sooner or later if we use up enough land, the increasing efficiency is probably not going to do the job. And recognizing that agriculture is one of the foundations of the economy and one of our major export products -- although some of that is changing in terms of the fruits and vegetables here -- we put that one in there. The number of property owners. Again, recognizing the difficulties of dealing with a lot of property owners versus a few. Finally, we get down to capital cost, truck traffic, and some of these cost factors that one of you had asked about earlier. And the last two -- cultural and historical resources. If there is a cultural site that's considered valuable, the state requires us to avoid it. So that's one that we don't have too much choice on. And proximity to the county boundary, and I guess the idea was not to get in trouble with our fellow counties by putting it right on the border and whatever. COMMISSIONER HANCOCK: Commissioner Constantine, a joint landfill? MR. PRIDDY: I -- I'd like to interject something here if I might. You need to keep in mind that while some of these things that are important to you are on the bottom of the list, when it actually comes to having an effect on a site, some of the things above it have no effect on some of the sites. So truck traffic, for example, is -- is going to have more of an impact on some sites even though it's low on the list. The thing that was first on the list, residential buffers -- once you get past three miles, the site scores the same as one 20 miles away. So truck traffic, in effect, would have more effect on -- on the ranking of that site than -- than what was on the top of the list. COMMISSIONER HANCOCK: I have a question along the same lines. I stopped you in mid sentence. Things like airport avoidance being ranked higher than capital costs -- you know, I understand if you're more than five miles from an airport, you rank the total score, as I just picked up, but I fail to see the problem between two miles from an airport as opposed to -- Just that ranking confuses me probably more than any other. Avoiding an airport versus the actual physical cost of construction -- I'm a little befuddled by that. COMHISSIONER CONSTANTINE: A couple of thoughts here. One is each -- You know, I mentioned how each one of these has a sheet. Each sheet will show you what -- how they're -- each one of these criteria are used, whether it's -- you know, a half mile from an airport are so many points or a mile -- COMHISSIONER HANCOCK: Right. I just looked at that for airports and -- COMMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: -- and -- but a big part -- why some of -- I just said that. And why some of those things are higher than, say, capital or hauling costs are just a matter of permitting, and if you can't permit them, you can't ever figure out how much it would be expense-wise to build or to drive there. And so I -- I think it's kind of a realism that, gee, if the FAA won't let you even get a start -- with them it's pretty black and white, yes or ~o. COMMISSIONER HANCOCK: So that five miles is kind of an FAA guideline? COMHISSIONER CONSTANTINE: Yeah. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: It seems like it would have been exclusionary then. COMMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: They have -- what is it -- 10,000 feet? 10,000 feet, I think, is black and white, and then they strongly discourage anything up to -- MR. SPEAR: FAA has a policy of 5,302, I think it is, and they have a very clear prohibition of 5,000 feet from a prop port and 10,000 feet from a jet port, and it has been the history of the Dufresne-Henry team that the policy requiring notification of facilities within five miles -- our experience has been that the FAA shows up at the permitting process with a request for denial. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: So is that an exclusionary or -- MR. SPEAR: No, it isn't because it's -- it -- it's not a prohibition, and if the -- if the committee felt that it was worthwhile for the county to expend the funds -- COMHISSIONER MAC'KIE: To fight it. MR. SPEAR: -- to fight it, it's fightable. There have been in my experience two successes, and I don't know how many sitings, and the committee just felt that if we can avoid it, we should avoid it. This is -- This is not a hard either -- evaluative criteria, but it's on that basis. COMHISSIONER MAC'KIE: This list is not so much what this committee sees as the most important to the least important concerns. It's more a list of rational criteria -- I mean -- I don't know. I'm having -- I thought that this was what you measured as most important to least important, but I'm hearing now that it's not exactly that. It's also a reality check on permitability. MR. SPEAR: Let me try something, and then if the committee disagrees with me, which they often do, they can simply beat on me like they always have. COMHISSIONER MAC'KIE: Good. MR. SPEAR: What you see here is an attempt by a group of citizens of Collier County to balance these issues in some perspective. So this is a balancing. This is not a priority of most important to least important. This is a series of tradeoffs from what would be heavily weighted or they feel should be heavily weighted to things that they feel aren't necessarily heavily weighted at all, and it's balanced against permitability, environmental concerns, social concerns. MR. STALLINGS: I -- I realize we're generating a lot of questions, and I'm sort of glad you all aren't my students back when I was a college professor or I would have been in trouble there. But we -- we did give careful consideration to a tremendous variety of issues, and it would have been better if you could have been there with us like Commissioner Constantine was, but recognizing that's not possible, that we sort of did our best here to come up with, as Jo said, a balancing act between the -- the impacts on the people and what we can get permitted and, you know, maintain the quality of our environment and lifestyle. MR. DELATE: That's a perspective to the cost. They're relative to each site. They're not necessarily the cost looking at construction of the site but relative to each site. And we talked it over with consultants and staff, and they indicated to us that the cost differentials between the sites in all likelihood acquisition -- The cost differences between constructing the sites and hauling costs over all between the sites once you based it on a per-ton basis is not going to be that significant. So that's probably why it's down lower on the list. It was between -- The relative differences between sites and those relative costs were not going to be that substantial in -- in difference. So that's why probably it's lower down on the list. MR. PRIDDY: I -- MR. MARSHALL: Commissioner, if I could just add-- Don Marshall of the Dufresne-Henry team. Commissioner Mac'Kie, just to give you a perspective, if you take the -- out of 46 sites, if you take the two highest -- most costly sites out, then the difference with the other 44 is less than $50 million over 50 years of life. So it's, like, a dollar fifty in the overall life of the landfill per ton. So the difference of the majority of the sites is very, very small in capital cost. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: And -- And hauling cost, do we have any ideas? MR. STALLINGS: Commissioner, I talked to the manager for a big citrus processing plant up north of Orlando once, and they were hauling citrus from Immokalee to up north of Orlando. And I said to them, I don't understand how you can handle all of those costs. And his answer was, the primary cost is just having to haul it someplace, and the extra miles or the extra hours don't really make that much difference. And I think in terms of extra miles here, we're not talking about really that many when you take into consideration the actual size of the county. In other words, it may be the difference between five miles and 12 miles. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Yeah. I see. MR. STEWART: And, also, the -- the -- the future centroid of -- We -- We -- We measured that from the future centroid of waste generation in Collier County which I think surprisingly is at the intersection of 951 and Pine Ridge Road. MR. PRIDDY: At the end of our almost all-day Saturday group meeting, I had an opportunity to attend a Christmas party that had a cash bar, and I spent a lot of money trying to forget about this day, only -- only -- only two months later to be asked to get up and talk about it again. COMMISSIONER HANCOCK: So are you asking where the nearest cash bar is? MR. PRIDDY: Well, I told folks when I left home, I'll be back in about five hours, and I'm either going to be real happy or real sad. My part in this is to talk a little bit about this -- this all-day session where we actually applied the weights to these 23 criteria. We were -- started the day off and were -- were given on some little cards all 23 criteria, and we were asked to sit and individually rank -- rank these from what was most important to us individually to what was least important to us individually. We took a few minutes and did that. Then we spent some time, each of us, going through those cards, talking to the other committee members about why that was important to us, why we placed it up front, why we placed some things in the middle of the group, why we placed some things at the end of the group or just basically, you know, weren't -- weren't that important to us. And so, you know, this -- this gave all of us before we started applying weights an opportunity to get a good feel of what everyone else in the room was -- was thinking. At that point, we -- we did a practice round of applying weights. And this practice round, of course, did not count towards the -- the consensus that we -- we ended up coming to, but this practice round really gave each of us an opportunity that if we had an agenda, this is where it came out, and it also gave us a good idea of -- of how many -- COMHISSIONER MAC'KIE: Other people's agenda. MR. PRIDDY: Yeah. Other people in the room, you know, where their agenda was. And that, I guess, can most easily be pointed out maybe with -- with this slide. There was at least one person that -- that wasn't at all concerned with Rookery Bay. That same person thought that capital cost was very important -- COMHISSIONER HANCOCK: Tim. MR. PRIDDY: -- and, you know, on up and down -- down the line with that, and you can pick out -- COMHISSIONER CONSTANTINE: Russell, just to explain, each one of the 23 can have from zero to 100 points. MR. PRIDDY: Right. Yeah. We -- COMHISSIONER MAC'KIE: I need a magnifying glass. MR. PRIDDY: And -- And, as you'll see, as we went through this -- this process, there was a lot of compromise to -- to come to consensus on this. I'll also point out that these were numbered one through ten or one through 11. So almost without exception we don't know who -- who voted for what, although there are a couple of them up there had you been a member of the committee that -- that kind of -- kind of stood out. Just as an example here -- No. Maybe I can't -- can't point out on -- on that. Anyway, at the end of each voting process, we went around the room and had some further discussion on one of these things that jumped out where someone, you know, put 100 points towards, and there were several people in the room that -- that had put fairly low -- We had some discussion back and forth on why that was so important to that person so that we got a -- you know, got a good feel and started moving towards consensus, and I think this is where some of the compromise came in. The first round being representative of everyone's agenda if they had one. But I'll have to say by the time we got to the end, I think anyone that -- that had an agenda had -- had moved, you know, to what the entire committee was -- was feeling and -- and -- and thinking. COMHISSIONER CONSTANTINE: Russell, the other thing too -- and, Jo, maybe you can help with this -- but when you have 23 criteria and 100 points on each one -- up to 100 points on each one and 11 different people doing 100 points on 23 things, it's pretty hard for any individual to skew the process, and that's the nice thing about doing it. MR. PRIDDY: Yeah. And -- And I'll -- I'll point out, we had one -- one member come in late that only voted on -- on one round, and realizing that everyone's first shot at this was -- was probably their agenda-type thing, but the net effect on this process was the standard deviation still moved down which is where we were trying to get. So that one vote, you know, really had almost no effect on the overall process here. So no one person could -- could drive the train or -- or influence, you know, what we were -- what we were doing there, and I think that's further truth of -- you know, of the process. And throughout on any one issue, you know, one person voting and giving 100 percent or giving zero points to that issue in the big scheme of things had -- had very little effect on the overall. So I -- I feel that the -- the process in that regard, you know, worked -- worked very well. And while it was a long, hard day and a lot of give and -- give and take, I -- I think the process worked -- worked for us. Any other questions from -- Did I cover all that I needed to -- MR. SPEAR: (Nodding head.) COMMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: You're getting awful good at this, Russell. MR. PRIDDY: I'm looking so forward to retirement from county jobs. COMMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: He was reluctantly selected as our spokesperson. COMMISSIONER HANCOCK: Reluctantly selected by. He's going to change his phone number, so I can't get ahold of him anymore. MR. PRIDDY: We may do more than that depending on the outcome of today's meeting. MR. SPEAR: Good afternoon. Good afternoon. My name is Jo Spear, and for those of you who -- who haven't been spending the past several months with me, I've been facilitating the siting process for the committee on behalf of the Dufresne-Henry team. My team got me in a room just before we came over here, hit me a couple of times with sticks so I'd pay attention to them and said that there's some things I have to straighten out. One of the things I have to straighten out -- and I thank the local press for pointing this out to the team -- is that I need to apologize to the committee and the boys in the back room for using the term "boys in the back room." They read your article and beat on me because of it. So what I'd like to do is introduce you to the boys in the back room. The boys in the back room for those of you that haven't been around for that comment are the mappets who have been working out of Gainesville and who have been kept in the dark about a lot of reality about Collier County. Their responsibility was to take the data sources offered by the committee, using the rule sets generated by the committee, either as definition rule sets or as criterion rule sets, and apply them to the base map, and you need to -- you need to meet them anyway. They're people like Bo Brunner. Bo has 20 -- 20 years' experience in solid waste engineering. He's done six major landfills in Florida. He has a B.S. In civil engineering. Bob Peterson is a hydrogeologist with 20 years' experience in Florida. He has a B.S. In geology. Ron Clark, a B.S. In soil science, two years' experience. Heidi Koontz, a masters in biology with five years' experience. And Marco Menendez, a masters in environmental engineering with one year experience. And that's the back-room boys. The next thing we need to clarify is the use of computers in this process, and I'd like to -- to show you the site weighting sheet for round two. And you'll see that we're dealing with a 10-by-23 matrix, 230 data points, and we have to calculate the total going across the chart, the minimum, the maximum, the standard deviation, the median, the mode, and the average, and the sole purpose of the computer at the workshop was to do those calculations, not to have any influence in the weighting of criteria. So it's -- it's not a computer program that generates the criteria in weights. It's simply using a computer to run a ton of data quickly so that we can go through round after round after round until we get what approximates a minimum standard deviation, and that was the definition of consensus that was used. Similarly, as you'll see, as we move on to the next topic, the use of the computer was, again, simply to do some relatively monotonous mathematics in large volumes. We have identified 46 sites. You've seen this one before. You've seen the -- the site weightings. Each of the criteria developed by the committee had a recommended database and a measurement of the criteria. So for each site, each of the criteria were measured and I -- It's in your handouts. So it's probably better to go through that and we'll just -- COHMISSIONER HAC'KIE: I can't see it there either. MR. SPEAR: Pardon? COHMISSIONER HAC'KIE: That's okay. I -- I just-- I just turned 40. I guess it's confirmed. It's the second thing to go. MR. PERKINS: I can't see it either, Pam. COHMISSIONER HAC'KIE: Memory is the first. COHMISSIONER HANCOCK: Yeah. I was only 39. MR. SPEAR: The residential buffer. The criterion measurement is distance in miles from residential areas between one-quarter and three miles from the site. Protection of drinking water wells is miles to the nearest community water well. The Rookery Bay, Henderson Creek criterion is measured in terms of in or out of Rookery Bay. And if you take a close look at it, you'll see that very few sites are in. Most of the sites are out. It turned out to be more of a non-discriminatory criteria than perhaps we originally thought. Drinking water protection is feet to the nearest private well. And the committee knows this, but for -- for the audience and the commissioners, we're using a surrogate for a private well, and the surrogate is a structure as identified on the USGS map, and we presume that that structure would be a house unless it's obviously a barn. And it being a house, it would probably have a private well. Groundwater quality. The measurement is inches per month of recharge to the upper Tamiami aquifer. Groundwater -- We did that. Surface water quality. It is feet to the nearest -- distance to the nearest surface water body. Rare, unique, and endangered species or natural -- I'm sorry -- natural areas is -- is in terms of acres of such areas, and you'll see we have only one site. So that, again, turned out to be a non-discriminatory criterion for us. Sensitive receptors. These are hospitals, homes, convalescent centers, retirement areas. The definition is a -- is a count, a simple count of such facilities in a three-mile area surrounding the site. Compatibility with adjacent land use. This is a matrix of percent area around the site that would be industrial, commercial, agricultural, or residential, and the criterion favors commercial, industrial. Wetland vegetative cover is measured in terms of acres of such vegetative cover to be taken. Protection of federal- and state-threatened and endangered species is a count of species. Panther avoidance is a distance to a definition of large number of panther sitings, panther density locations. Hydric soils are acres taken. Number of on-site residences is a simple count. Airport avoidance is distance in miles up to five miles. Effect on predatory and scavenger birds is miles to the nearest rookery from the site. Preservation of farm fields and citrus groves is acres. Number of property owners is a simple count. Capital costs is in terms of the nearest million dollars, net present value. Truck traffic is a surrogate for cost. No. I'm sorry. Truck traffic is a criteria that tends to push truck traffic away from residential areas. So it's miles to the nearest arterial roadway, and it favors closer to the arterial road than further away from it. Hauling costs. We're using a surrogate for cost distance. Host hauling cost would be looked at in -- in terms of dollars per loaded mile or dollars per ton mile. The distance surrogate would serve for all time. Cultural and historic resource protection is a distance to the closest such facility. And, again, you'll see that this -- this doesn't discriminate very well. And proximity to the county boundary is in terms of miles from the site to the county boundary. Some asides concerning criteria, hauling costs -- conversations with the county staff, their estimates are the maximum cost increment to the furthest site be on the order of five to $10 per household per year as an incremental cost. Looking at the site size in capital cost is a function of the total cost of the site. It's roughly three and a half percent for land cost -- acquisition cost. Support facilities, roughly 4.1 percent. The bulk of the cost, construction of the landfill itself. In terms of both cost for wetland mitigation and in terms for wetland acres taken -- it's off of the NWI maps -- that data has to be confirmed by field verification. So each of those criteria for each site have been measured, and this table is the results of that measurement. COHMISSIONER HAC'KIE: Can I ask a stupid question? MR. SPEAR: No questions are stupid. COHMISSIONER HAC'KIE: Only the -- Only the unasked. I'm trying to -- I -- I actually went and had this enlarged so I could read it at my advanced age, and I see across the top there's A1 through U3. MR. SPEAR: Yes. COHMISSIONER HAC'KIE: Those are sites? MR. SPEAR: They're the sites as identified on the site map, yes, ma'am. COHHISSIONER HAC'KIE: And then -- then the numbers beneath them, one through -- but they're not -- one through 45, what is that? MR. SPEAR: Number one is the -- is the first site in the list. Number two is the second site in the list. It has nothing to do -- COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Okay. MR. SPEAR: -- with the order of preference of any of the sites. COMHISSIONER MAC'KIE: So I can ignore that? MR. SPEAR: Yes. COMHISSIONER MAC'KIE: Okay. And then average weight is the average total weight for all the criteria? MR. SPEAR: No. The average weight is the average weight assigned to that criteria during the weighting workshop. COMHISSIONER MAC'KIE: And then if I want to know, for example, how did site L3 -- what were its points on buffer from residential area -- MR. SPEAR: You would multiply its raw score -- COMHISSIONER MAC'KIE: Which is 1.7; yes? MR. SPEAR: No, you wouldn't. You would take its raw score and scale it between one and five. The actual measurements -- The max and min -- See the minimum and the maximum? COMHISSIONER MAC'KIE: Gottcha. I see that in the last columns. MR. SPEAR: Okay. The minimum score is one. The maximum score is five for criteria that favor the maximum. COMHISSIONER MAC'KIE: Okay. MR. SPEAR: And the maximum score is one, and the minimum score is five for criteria that favor the minimum. COMHISSIONER MAC'KIE: Okay. MR. SPEAR: The measurements are then linearly scored in the range one to five, and that score is multiplied by the weight. COMHISSIONER MAC'KIE: And -- And then where is that produced? Where are the results of that equation? Have you produced those? MR. SPEAR: The mathematics? COMHISSIONER MAC'KIE: Yes. No. Where -- I want to see the results. MR. SPEAR: That's coming. COMHISSIONER MAC'KIE: Okay. I'm a bottom-line kind of person. I want to see the bottom line. MR. SPEAR: We want you to understand how we got there COMHISSIONER MAC'KIE: No problem. MR. SPEAR: -- because questions on the way there will save a lot of questions once we get there. COMHISSIONER MAC'KIE: I was just hoping you didn't think I was figuring that out on my own. MR. SPEAR: Oh, not at all. COMHISSIONER HANCOCK: Oh, no. We didn't make that assumption. MR. SPEAR: Not at all. If you do the math -- if -- If you do the math, you end up with table -- table one which is the overall rating by total site score. COMHISSIONER MAC'KIE: And the third column would be the -- the -- the -- identify the properties if you were ready to tell us that and you're not? MR. SPEAR: It -- It could be, yes. Could very well be. We need to build some excitement here. MR. PRIDDY: Can I ask a question? MR. SPEAR: Sure can. MR. PRIDDY: The -- All 46 sites are shown here. Not all of them are shown here, meaning some of them got screened out before going here? MR. SPEAR: You have to wait until we get there, Russell. You constantly do that to me. You constantly want to jump ahead. COHMISSIONER HAC'KIE: I'm with Russell. COHMISSIONER HANCOCK: There will be no thinking ahead. MR. SPEAR: Yes. MR. PRIDDY: The ones -- COHMISSIONER HAC'KIE: No thinking ahead. MR. PRIDDY: The ones next to my house aren't on this list -- MR. WOOD: That's one way to look at it. MR. SPEAR: What -- What's very interesting about this list is that the difference in score between site one and site two as identified here is 77 points. The difference -- The next delta is 18 and then 12 and then 12 again and then nine. We start to get a natural break of five. Another way to -- to look at this is to plot the score versus the site as a bar chart. COHMISSIONER HAC'KIE: Do we have that one? MR. SPEAR: No. COHMISSIONER HANCOCK: That assures you'll watch. COHMISSIONER HAC'KIE: More drama. MR. SPEAR: More drama. COHMISSIONER HAC'KIE: Okay. MR. PRIDDY: For $800,000 we need to make this last. COHMISSIONER HAC'KIE: I'm with you on that. No more drama. MR. SPEAR: And you can -- you can see the break at five. You can see another break at about maybe nine or 11. Now -- So we have 46 sites -- wrong -- wrong one -- 46 sites, and they're scored from forty-four o four to twenty-eight twenty-five. We're obviously not going to deal with the tail end of the list. So we ask ourselves a question in looking for this best of class group of sites. What happens if we cut the list in half, eliminate the bottom half of the list, recalculate the data range and see what happens. And that's what happens. Russell's second list. (indicating) COHMISSIONER HAC'KIE: Half as many. MR. SPEAR: Half as many. COHMISSIONER HAC'KIE: That's what happens. You get half as many. I'm so impressed. MR. SPEAR: Okay. The orientation of sites change when we do this a little bit because we change the data range. The maximum and minimum going across the list of all sites have changed, and what we're doing is eliminating outliers. In fact, I don't think we'll do that yet. We're eliminating outliers, sites that have a uniqueness where they may score high or score low, so we'll take a look at that data. Well, we were going to take a look at that data, but we've lost it. MR. WOOD: Raw score 23. MR. SPEAR: Okay. MR. WOOD: Raw score 23. MR. SPEAR: Okay. And now we have raw score for 23 sites, the top 23 of the list of 46, and what we have done with this statistical approach of dropping the -- the tail of the data is that we have eliminated sites with the following features. Highest capital cost is eliminated. The facility with the most on-site residents is eliminated. The facility with the most property owners is no longer in the -- in consideration. All sites with rare and unique natural areas are eliminated from consideration. Sites closest to residential areas, sites with a residential area distance of zero are eliminated. Sites with the highest amount of wetland acreage are eliminated. The outliers have been stripped from consideration. CHAIRMAN NORRIS: Let me ask you a question on that. When you were talking about outliers, you said that -- that by eliminating the outliers, we were going to take off the lower scores and the highest scores. Why would you want to take off the highest scores? MR. SPEAR: No. No. We didn't take off the highest scores. CHAIRMAN NORRIS: That's what you said. MR. SPEAR: Oh, I'm sorry. We left the highest scores, eliminated the lowest 50 percent of our data, of our sites, and then we took the data range, the max and min and recalculated. CHAIRMAN NORRIS: Yeah. I understood that part -- MR. SPEAR: Okay. Based on the raw scores -- CHAIRMAN NORRIS: -- but you did say at one point taking off the highest and the lowest. MR. SPEAR: Just the highest value. CHAIRMAN NORRIS: Oh, okay. MR. SPEAR: Okay? I don't listen to myself at times, and I'm glad I have people correct me. I need it. Here's the top 23, looking at them again, and the groupings are a little tighter. The first five or six tend to cjuster together. There's a major difference at seven and then another cjuster of four or five sites and then a major differential and another cjuster, and you can see that in the bar graph. COHMISSIONER HAC'KIE: Along the bottom are the site numbers, one through -- MR. SPEAR: Rank numbers. COHMISSIONER HAC'KIE: Rank numbers. COHMISSIONER HANCOCK: Nice try. COHMISSIONER HAC'KIE: Sorry. Still trying. Still trying. MR. SPEAR: You can see that there's a -- there's a natural break about -- about here, and there's another natural break about here. COHMISSIONER HAC'KIE: Oh, I see. MR. SPEAR: See how they're -- they're sort of cjustering now and separating one from the other? We say that we -- We asked the committee during the luncheon break at the workshop if they would take the 23 criteria and group them by some kind of commonality, and they put so many together in one group and so many together in another group and so many together in another group. We asked them to go back and give a title to these groups, and they created five groups. They created a group of criteria that they called water because the criteria related to -- to water issues; a group that was broader, environmental, because the criteria related to environmental issues; a group called people because the criteria related to people avoidance issues; a group called cost because the criteria related to cost issues; and a group that we relatively uncreatively defined as other. CHAIRMAN NORRIS: Your -- Your groups, you have water and environmental. Would environmental be X water? MR. SPEAR: The environmental would be without water, yeah. They were asked -- We had the criterion on stickies, Post-it -- UNKNOWN VOICE: Post-it notes. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: We know what you mean. MR. SPEAR: Thank you. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Those little yellow things. MR. SPEAR: Those -- Those things. MR. WOOD: (indicating) MR. SPEAR: And we had them on the wall, and they -- they arranged them in groups and then came back and named the groups. Sensitivity analysis of the sites would be one -- One approach to sensitivity analysis for the site ratings would be to say how did the sites behave in just these groups. And, now, this is the -- the 23 sites by rating number one through 23 and how they behave in terms of water criteria, environmental criteria -- water criteria only, environmental criteria only, people criteria only, cost criteria only, other only, and then all the criteria considered together. And we've shaded that first break point, the sites ordered one through five, and what we're trying to see is where do these sites show up in this group of criteria where we're segregating criteria groupings away from all criteria. And what we're hoping to see is that the top sites -- top five, top six, top -- whatever the area of consideration or concern might be, how do they behave in terms of these criteria groupings alone. Are they in the upper 50 percent of the group? Do they -- Are they cream? Are they headed towards the top? And you can see that they bounce around quite a bit. They stay reasonably cjustered together. And they're in the upper portion in general, water, environment, and people, and they tend to -- to not do very well in terms of cost and other. COMMISSIONER HANCOCK: So the number one ranked site is MR. SPEAR: Could I have the envelope, please? This is -- This is the point in time where we ask if anyone would care to run a pool. But if we take a look at the 46 sites, they are ordered like that. The highest rated site is L12. The lowest rated site is R1. We'll pause as you mark these in your notes. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Thank you. MR. SPEAR: But you're going to have to erase what you're writing. So we might want to move forward. COMMISSIONER HANCOCK: Let's move forward. MR. SPEAR: All right. Because we're going to throw away the lower 50 percent of all sites and deal with the upper 50 percent. Well, before we do that, let's -- let's look for break points in the -- in the 46, and you can see that L12 is a standout and then we -- COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Can I ask a question about the shape of the sites? MR. SPEAR: Yes, ma'am. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: Is -- The shape of those sites, is that based on property -- owned tracts -- HR. SPEAR: No. COHMISSIONER HAC'KIE: -- the necessity of size -- MR. SPEAR: No. COHMISSIONER HAC'KIE: I mean, they're odd shapes. They're not just -- MR. SPEAR: We're going to -- We're going to -- I'm sorry. If you can't hear me, I'll speak up. We're going to relive an exercise that we did with the committee, and I'll try to do this in such a way that most of the audience and the combined committee can see. Early on in the process we needed to determine how large a piece of property we're looking for, and we asked a question. How much property do we need to deposit 50 years of solid waste generated by Collier County, and Collier County's running about 1,000 tons a day right now. That's about 305,000 tons a year. That's a mega mess of tons at the end of 50 years, something on the order in round numbers of 35 million tons. How much space do we need to pack away 35 million tons was the question. We made some simple assumptions. 480. MR. WOOD: Yes. MR. SPEAR: And we need 480 acres. Remember, by our site definition rules, it can't be higher than 125 feet. If you look at the reality of Collier County, we can't be deeper into the ground than six or eight inches. That's tongue in cheek, but this is not an excavated area. COHMISSIONER HANCOCK: Short of reality. MR. SPEAR: Yeah. Right. Right. We had an exercise where we worked with the committee. We said this is -- We called this area, the actual disposal area, area A for the purposes of discussion. The county wanted this facility -- and the committee believed that this facility should be more than a landfill, that it should have room for ancillary activities such as recycling, be it passive or active, room for a HRF. We know we need in -- in -- Particularly in this county, we know we need a reasonable amount of room for stormwater management facilities. We wanted a garage. We wanted an administration building. So we wanted some ancillary facilities. And in this perfect world we're creating as we talked about, what's the minimum size, we came up with a need of ancillary facilities of 300 acres. And this area we called area B. Now, we wanted to buffer the facility to separate it from the -- the rest of the world, and it was decided that an appropriate buffer would be 500 feet, and we called the outer square area C. And area C -- something like 1,180 acres, and this is the minimum configuration to handle the capacity and the ancillary facilities at a 500-foot buffer for the county. That became some of the input to the gentlemen who were preparing maps in -- I can't do it -- for the boys in the back room. Now, they had to -- they had to add a little sense of reality, so we gave them some leeway which is why we -- why the committee decided the maximum site size should be such that the ratio of area C to area B is going to be equal to or less than two, okay, and this is the kind of thing that they did. Site A1 which is in the northeastern portion of the county had some wetlands. The base map is the NWI map in color. It had some wetlands. We had to optimize the area, and this is the kind of a site shape that was drawn. We could have up to three disposal areas in our site definition rule. So this site to get the acreage required has two site A -- two area A's. They don't equal 480 acres. They're a little more because we're losing this. If we had half of it, we would lose the space between the two. So they're a little bigger to make up for it. We had the ancillary areas, area B. SW, stormwater management. So this is the general site layout, the 500-foot buffer around it, and if you look at the dotted line and compare it to the shape of 1A, that's the size, shape, and orientation of that site developed by the mappets in Gainesville utilizing base maps provided to them by the committee, rules for site definition provided to them by the committee, and the available candidate areas as provided by committee rules. So that's where we got the shape and the sizes. Each one of the sites is footprinted, stamped in place in a candidate area in a reasonable fashion to minimize wetland taking -- remember, we can't take more than 50 acres, given our site definition rules -- to maximize site -- the use of the site effectively. If we can do it with one disposal area, we can do it with one. If we can't, we'll do it with two. If we can't, we'll do it with three. If we can't, it's not a good site because we can't have more than three disposal areas. If we have to take more than 50 acres, we can't put a site down there because we have a site definition rule that says we can't take more than 50 acres. So we have -- I think the site I.D. Rules are some 16 in number, and they were used to define and draw sites. I'll give you another example. We have two sites close together. Remember the rule said that area C can overlap but area B cannot? Here are two sites close together and upside down and backwards -- Well, it's just upside down. And they're overlapping in the buffer zone, but they're not overlapping in any other area. These are H2 and Hi. Shall I go on? You need to know -- number next at this -- the site boundaries here are not necessarily the ultimate site boundaries. The site boundaries are those boundaries that were used to determine sites for the purpose of site selection. If, for example, the highest ranked site -- let me -- I don't want to do it that way because it's misleading. MR. PERKINS: Uh-oh. MR. SPEAR: I always worry about misleading. I used to date her, and I never ended up where I started off. Let's assume that blue squiggly line is a river. Let us further assume that the site mappets have defined that blob as a site. And the blue line and the site -- the outer line of the blob, the site boundary. If, in fact, this becomes the number one site, if ground-truths, it becomes the future landfill of Collier County, the actual site boundary, if the property owner owns property in this configuration, this becomes the actual site boundary when the property is acquired. So there's no attempt to make site boundaries consistent with property boundaries at this level. These are the 46, L1, L12 over here, R1 at the far left -- your far right. You can see a natural break at about L9. I was going to say it can't be L99. A natural break at about L9. There's another natural break at about N2. We've got another natural break at about A6. We have some cjustering, but, remember, we took the top 23, recalculated the data range, and ran them again. And the top rated 23 sites in Collier County are L12 at the top and A3 at the bottom. The first five are L12 to L6. The first ten, L12 to L9 -- L5. The first 15, L12 to A4. The first 20, L12 to L3. If we take a look at the plot of the first 23, you can see that -- that the top two rated sites cjuster together, a very small difference. Then there's a cjuster of about three or four more and then a significant break, a cjuster of four, a break, a cjuster of four, a break, a cjuster of four, a break, and then they tail off. What happens if we look at sensitivity analysis of these sites? Our highest ranked site is in the top five for water criteria. It's in the top seven for environmental criteria. It's in the top seven for people criteria. It is not quite as competitive -- expensive from a cost standpoint. It's -- It's number 16. It climbs back up in the other criteria, and it's rated number one in terms of all criteria. Site number 11, Lll, the second site, rates fairly low for water, fairly high for environment, sort of average for people, fairly favorable in terms of cost, fairly average for -- in terms of water. Look at the others and you can see how they -- they bounce around in sensitivity. Let's take a look at the 43 versus the twenty -- 46 versus the 23. From an overall rating, the top five represent the top seven. L12 staying out there as a front runner separated from Lll by A1. L8 separated from seven and six by L10. In terms of water, L12 is -- is in the upper quarter. We looked at those before the individual categories. In terms of the top 23, the overall rating, it's L12, Lll, L8, L7, and L6. So, in summary, the top 23 rated sites of the sites identified in Collier County are as shown in table nine. The top five rated sites in that group are L12, Lll, L8, L7, and L6. Here they were with their respective scores. MR. PRIDDY: What -- What does the cjustering of these sites say about the process, or can you comment on that? MR. SPEAR: The cjuster of L sites? MR. PRIDDY: Yeah. MR. SPEAR: They're in the same general area literally is what -- I'm -- I'm -- I'm serious. We're talking about relatively the same geography, if you take a look at the -- the driver criterias, the individual scoring which will be part -- part of the tech memo, but the individual scoring isn't markedly different. I mean, these are -- MR. WOOD: If you look at -- If you look at the sites -- This is a map of the sites. Six, seven, eight, 11, and 12 are all adjacent to each other. MR. SPEAR: Yeah. And you can easily identify six, seven, eight, 11, and 12 as one mega area with similar characteristics. MR. PRIDDY: It's all developed farm field and citrus grove. I mean, it's 100 percent -- MR. SPEAR: That's true. Yeah. If you look at the -- look at the other cjusters throughout the -- the ranking of the 23 or the 46, that's a similar occurrence. We have essentially geographic cjusters of sites that are showing up close together. MR. HENNING: Jo, what was the -- There's -- There's a wide margin between Lll and L12 and the cost factor, but they're right next to each other. Why would that be? MR. SPEAR: I think part of that might be site size, disposal area sizes. One of them is -- Lll is a multiple disposal area site. So it's -- actually has more lined area than -- I'm sorry. L12 is a multiple A site. So it actually has more lined area than Lll, and that's the -- that's the major cost driver. We can buy an awful lot of acres before we come up to the -- the cost of one acre of liner. MR. HENNING: I see. MR. SPEAR: If you go back to either -- If you go back to either this raw -- If you go back to either this raw score or the 23 raw scores, you'll see the high-cost sites, and you can identify high-cost sites as being multiple disposal area sites. Yes? MR. CARPENTER: Yeah. Jo, could you tell us what's out there on L12 and Lll now, what use that land is under? MR. PRIDDY: I can. MR. CARPENTER: I'm just curious whether it's ag land or what. MR. PRIDDY: It's all active orange grove or active farm field. MR. SPEAR: That's right. MR. PRIDDY: Do we have -- I had asked y'all earlier to have these listed to hand out so that we didn't have to make notes. Do y'all have a copy of the lists? MR. SPEAR: We have a copy of the final 23 for the committee. MR. PRIDDY: Can we have that at this point? MR. SPEAR: Certainly may. MR. CARPENTER: Can I ask whose back yard it's in? MR. PRIDDY: It's closest -- closest to mine, but this is the corner -- this is the corner of Campkeys Road (phonetic) and 858. Barton Collier owns the 11 site. Pacific Land Co. Owns L12. L7 would probably be Barton Collier. L8 is -- is Pacific Land Co., but this is the -- You could pretty well draw a line from the curve up by L -- L2 straight down. That's Campkeys Road. COMHISSIONER HANCOCK: My concern -- I was just, you know, mentioning to Tom here that -- and I -- Russell, you and I've talked about this. When you start looking at taking active farming land that have been used and, God forbid, profitable in the way things go today, not only do you have a cost of acquisition of land alone, you have a cost of acquisition of a profitable business or a business itself, and if we're to move ahead and look at doing ground-truthing to qualify these sites and we know that they're active -- actively farmed and they are part of an overall business enterprise, you know, was that factored into the project cost and if so -- MR. SPEAR: Yes. COMHISSIONER HANCOCK: So everything that showed up between, say, 315 million and 390-some-odd million included buying someone's rights of profit to their -- their agricultural lands? MR. SPEAR: Included purchase of the land -- COMHISSIONER HANCOCK: Okay. But -- MR. SPEAR: -- at agricultural land prices if it were agricultural, industrial land prices if it's industrial, residential if it were -- COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: But that's not the question. COMMISSIONER HANCOCK: There's a difference in agricultural land between ag land that is either lying fallow or not being actively farmed and ag lands that are being actively farmed and maybe even profitable, and the cost of acquisition of those lands far exceeds those of fallow ag lands. MR. SPEAR: Well, we used highest value pricing. MR. WILKISON: Right. We used -- We used numbers for active farmlands that are typically numbers -- If you go out and I want to buy so and so's citrus grove, that's the number we used based on the sale. MR. PRIDDY: But it did not take into effect paying them for loss of use of the land as -- COMMISSIONER HANCOCK: Right because if I'm -- MR. PRIDDY: -- or the tomato crop or -- COMMISSIONER HANCOCK: If I'm going to sell my orange grove, it's because I'm tired of farming oranges, or I'm tired of growing oranges, you know, or I want to be -- MR. CARPENTER: Or somebody offers you a good deal. COMMISSIONER HANCOCK: Exactly. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: It's an eminent domain question though. David Weigel, don't -- don't we have to consider the cost of the business in an eminent domain -- in a taking case? MR. WEIGEL: Well, it depends only upon if the business itself is being lost. There may be severance damages, and/or there may be actual business loss damages. But if you're just taking part of the land and the business continues, there will certainly be some distinctions between the two. MR. SPEAR: One of the difficulties we have in assessing the value of the farmland when it's being taken for this purpose is that the committee was explicit that the buffer shall be used for active farming. COMMISSIONER HANCOCK: I would hope -- You probably have experience, I would think, in -- in taking active farmlands and what type of cost differential there may be. I would like to see before authorizing any process that goes into doing ground-truthing or -- or going down three or five sites that we need to look at on an investigative basis -- I want to know more about what kind of costs do we get ourselves into with active farmlands versus inactive. That -- That -- I just need a good feel on that. COMMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: That's even going to make a difference what the product is. I mean, if it's citrus and they planted trees five years ago, that's one thing. If it's tomatoes and they clear them every fall or every season, that's different. MR. SPEAR: Well -- well -- MR. PRIDDY: I think my -- MR. SPEAR: I think we need to -- to have a little reality check here. The land cost for each of the facilities on average is three and a half percent of the total cost of the facility and the capital cost assessment. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: And that's including the issue that Commissioner Hancock is raising. That -- That differential includes that concept? CHAIRMAN NORRIS: His point is that whether it's three and a half or four and a half, what difference does it make. COMMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: It's a small portion -- MR. SPEAR: I mean, if we increased the land cost by 2 percent -- MR. STEWART: Over 50 years though. COMMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: I don't -- I don't -- Yeah. I don't disagree that we need to make that a key part of the selection process, and we don't want to get in and find that out after the fact. We need to do that up front. But, yeah, as Jim just said, if he's -- if it ends up being a $3 million differential -- what -- you divide that by 50 years by 70,000 customers per year for 50 years, the differential isn't a lot -- isn't as much as it sounds when you just say $3 million. MR. PRIDDY: And supposedly the idea behind that criteria -- and I don't think it's any secret that I'm the one that -- that pushed that out there -- was to try to keep us -- in hopes that the criteria would keep us off of that and into pasture land as opposed to developed. COMHISSIONER HANCOCK: You can pick up cows and move them. It's a little tougher -- MR. PRIDDY: Right. COMHISSIONER HANCOCK: -- to move those citrus trees. MR. DELATE: The committee also discussed the county has the option of leasing back portions of those lands until needed. COMHISSIONER HANCOCK: Right. That was mentioned -- MR. SPEAR: Yeah. COMHISSIONER HANCOCK: -- using the perimeter area for farming, the buffer area for farming and so forth. MR. SPEAR: Either -- Either as a lease-back or a right of use for a farmer, farmland taken so there's no leasehold. COMHISSIONER HANCOCK: Again, I may be getting a little bit ahead of ourselves, but it seems to me the difference in eminent domain of taking an operating business versus taking fallow land is a time factor which equates to cost also. And, again, I'm only raising those as concerns. I know we're not going to have answers here today but -- COMHISSIONER CONSTANTINE: That needs to be an early answer. COMHISSIONER HANCOCK: Yeah. I'd just like to have some feel for that process and the difference between eminent domain and those two scenarios. MR. SPEAR: I also think we need to consider the -- CHAIRMAN NORRIS: Excuse me. Russell, isn't -- isn't active citrus grove land priced at a certain value irrespective of the business? MR. PRIDDY: I think anything's for sale. I mean, you know, I am. You've got enough money, I would -- COMHISSIONER HANCOCK: Thank you for that lesson on morals, Mr. Priddy. CHAIRMAN NORRIS: Well, my point is you can go out anywhere today and buy active citrus land. It will be "X" price per acre, and you don't buy the business. You buy the citrus land. That's factored in the cost per acre. Correct? MR. PRIDDY: I -- I think the -- I -- I -- CHAIRMAN NORRIS: You can argue and -- If you're going to say that it makes a difference to taking, you've got to remember that the money you're giving per acre is the same amount of money you can go buy off -- you can go out and buy replacement citrus grove acres. MR. PRIDDY: I think that holds true with willing seller, willing buyer. But I -- I think when you -- you come -- you know, come into -- CHAIRMAN NORRIS: Well, obviously when you get into eminent domain, the -- the property owner is going to try to squeeze you. MR. PRIDDY: You -- You -- You're going -- You're -- You're going to have a long -- You're going to have a long -- long list of extra costs that you probably normally wouldn't be talking about. COHHISSIONER HANCOCK: Okay. Again, it's been raised as -- as a question, as a concern, something I'd like to get some answers to, and I'm satisfied that that's not going to happen today, so let's move on to the next item. MR. SPEAR: I think it's important -- I think it's important we look at one overhead again, and that's the raw scores of the 23 sites, and you have this in the handout. I think it's important that we give some thought to -- to what our options are, and we talked about this in the committee, but we have, in essence, in Collier County residential property, wetland, and agricultural land, and very little of that agricultural land is not being used. And if you look at the criteria for preservation of farmlands, we have a measurement of farmlands that would be taken, every one of the 23 sites, and there's a similar measurement for every one of the 46 sites, and this is going to be a very, very difficult issue to avoid because of the land-type options available at 1,100 acres minimum in the county. MR. WOOD: It's interesting to note, of the top five sites, the site that takes the least amount of active farmland is site L12, the highest ranked site. The other four take about 700 acres, and site L12 takes about 400 acres of active farm -- farmland. MR. STALLINGS: Well, I share Russell's concern about farmland being taken out of production, and obviously there's some cost involved. Also, the cost of permitting is pretty high, and I suspect that the farmland will cost a heck of a lot less to permit, will be much less contentious than some of the other areas. COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: And, Jo, one more time, you had said the committee had indicated area C in the landfill can actually be farmed. MR. SPEAR: Area C, given the committee's rules, is an area that farming would be permitted, and it would be active farming. Another thing too -- and there's a good point -- is that we've got a phase, a 50-year phase cycle here. So a lot of area A, all of area C, maybe even parts of area B could stay in farm use as the site's being developed. So there is some common ground here for all parties to -- to work their way through this facility. What's next? MR. PRIDDY: And depending on temperatures in the next few days, it may be cheaper -- COHMISSIONER HANCOCK: I wasn't about to say that, Russ. I was thinking two more cold snaps, boy, and they'll be looking to give it to us. MR. SPEAR: These are some of the things that -- that we think are important to continue to have progress in this process. As we have said -- and to date it's been a desk-top survey. We have not let anybody near the potential sites. We -- We don't want to get involved in -- in trespass or other strange circumstances. We need to visually confirm the criteria that we can. We need to get out there and do some walkovers. We need to get specific site information from the community around the site relative to the criteria again, and we need to come back to the committee with the -- with the data that we have from the walkovers and the data we have from the town meetings and talk about how the -- the -- the measurements stand up against the reality check that we've just done with walkovers and town meetings. So we need to confirm the site ratings, and then the ultimate next step would be to ground-truth the top-rated site. Any questions about any part of the presentation? MR. HENNING: Jo, how many sites would have a walkover? MR. SPEAR: The way the sites are -- are breaking out -- the graph. COMMISSIONER HANCOCK: Do you have a graph for every answer? MR. WOOD: This is not all of our graphs. MR. SPEAR: It's an engineering thing. If -- If it -- If it's not a graph or it doesn't have numbers, we have difficulty talking about it, you know. If you take a look at that, there's a -- there's a natural break at about five or six. So you might want to take a walk over the top five or six sites. COMMISSIONER HANCOCK: What does our contract specify? MR. SPEAR: Five. COMMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: Five it is. MR. SPEAR: And it's not -- I mean, it's not a bad choice because we do have that natural break right in there. Yeah. MR. PRIDDY: It -- It won't take long. They're all in the same area. The roads connect. MR. SPEAR: And you can see that -- that short shift, so five makes sense. Any other questions? Another fun time. Yes? MR. CARPENTER: Jo, in the sites or basically as I look at these top five -- and Russell's right. They are very much grouped. Would it make sense to talk and to look at it in the sense as a whole if there is -- if there is a configuration within those configurations? Do you know what I'm saying? MR. SPEAR: If -- If the ground -- If the walkovers don't change -- don't make major changes, it might make sense to look at the five sites as an area in which to put an optimum footprint -- MR. CARPENTER: That's what I was thinking. MR. SPEAR: -- and keep that optimum footprint fluid until the ground-truthing is over. So if the -- if the geophysical work -- I can't think of the word -- drillings -- UNKNOWN VOICE: Hydrogeo. MR. SPEAR: -- hydrogeo -- Thank you. If the hydrogeo work says that it's better if the A area were about 700 feet that way, we're not constrained. We don't say it's the wrong site, stop, spend our money someplace else. We'll just move over 700 feet, look at the __ MR. CARPENTER: Yeah. Look at it as -- as an area. MR. SPEAR: As -- As a large blob and then optimize something inside of it, yeah. It might make sense -- again, if there aren't major changes due to the walkover or the town meetings. MR. WOOD: David, to get outside of that area, you have to go to look at site seven and eight which will give you A1 and B -- B2, I believe, or A2 and B1. MR. CARPENTER: Well, I'm ready -- I know when -- when you do the walkover, those become a little clearer, that we have some contiguous sites and -- and the idea of -- MR. SPEAR: It might make a -- Yeah. MR. CARPENTER: -- taking a look at that if this is the ideal area, particularly the L12 and Lll sites. MR. SPEAR: It might make a lot of sense under those conditions to optimize inside that general area. It makes a lot of economic sense. Thank you again. MR. PRIDDY: Mr. Chairman, I had asked for an addenda to the agenda in reference to the spokesperson -- COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: Yeah. HR. PRIDDY: -- and it was brought up at the time that I was elected that that would be until the site identification process, and at this point I would like to resign as spokesperson for the group. I will resign as spokesperson for the group. COHMISSIONER HAC'KIE: I hereby resign? MR. PRIDDY: I hereby resign as spokesperson for the group. MR. STALLINGS: Unequivocally and permanently and -- COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: Will not pursue nor will you accept the nomination. MR. STEWART: I move Tom Henning for the spokesperson of the group. COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: Is there a second for that? MR. DELATE: Second. MR. PRIDDY: I -- I would -- would have -- would only offer that maybe the representative from district five be considered since this is in district five but with that -- COHMISSIONER HANCOCK: Let me ask a point of clarification. At what point do we need a spokesperson? Because it seems now we're going into -- you know, we're going into a level in which the consultants' input is going to provide a stronger framework than the general citizenry has in the past. So I just ask what -- what need there is for that person. COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: What we've done with it is, for the benefit of the media, whomever, if there are -- if they have questions on our calendar, on our schedule, on how we're -- how we got to where we are on virtually anything that the committee itself is doing, rather than have different committee members all saying different things, we just funnel it-- have up to this point funnelled it to Russell and said, "You have to talk to Mr. Priddy," and so it's -- it's not necessarily a spokesman on -- on behalf of the county but just on where the activity of the committee is at that point. CHAIRMAN NORRIS: I might suggest that instead of appointing another spokesperson, it might be appropriate at this time in the process to start issuing black jackets. COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: I might suggest this. If -- If -- Why don't we wait, and when the committee next sits down -- which is when? MR. WILKISON: We need to talk about that. We had a meeting -- the next scheduled was February 21. I think our last meeting in January we had talked about whether or not you wanted to meet again then. We won't have any results from any of the walkovers by then. The next meeting after that was in March. I'm not sure when that was. COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: Perhaps we could go ahead and keep -- MR. WILKISON: March 22. COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: Perhaps we could keep our scheduled meeting in February just to kind of get our feet on the ground, and it will be a short get-together, but at least everybody know -- will know where we are and -- COHMISSIONER HANCOCK: And everyone knows that Russell's no longer it. COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: Jim, you still have a motion on the floor. If you want to -- MR. STEWART: I'll -- I'll withdraw it. COHHISSIONER CONSTANTINE: Okay. MR. STALLINGS: Maybe it would work better if we had some kind of rather usual person to handle it as opposed to a committee member. MR. STEWART: You mean like a staff person? COHMISSIONER HAC'KIE: Like a P.R. Person over there? It occurs to me. MR. PRIDDY: Well, we also have -- MR. STALLINGS: Or staff person. MR. PRIDDY: We also have a county staff person that has been to -- MR. RUSSELL: I'm willing to field the callers. MR. PRIDDY: -- that might be a -- you know, might be an appropriate solution to this. MR. RUSSELL: I think my -- my number has been publicly advertised. MR. PRIDDY: Yeah. COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: Why don't we do that for at least until the February 21 meeting, and then we can formalize that if we want to do that. MR. PRIDDY: With that, I would move that we appoint David Russell as spokesperson for the committee. MR. STAIGER: Second. COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: Forever or through February 21 or -- Sorry. I missed that. MR. PRIDDY: Until further notice. COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: Congratulations, David. Any objection to that from the committee? MR. DICHIO: You are going to hold the meeting on the 21st, and David Russell is the spokesperson -- so I'm straight on that. COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: Correct. Jo, the walkover of the five sites will be -- do we have any idea when that would be, and is that open for any participation, or will the media be alerted, or how are we going about that? MR. SPEAR: We can schedule it as soon as we're authorized to do it by the committee, and we can do it any number of formats. The concern that we have about people other than the tech team is liability and insurance, and I'm sure we can get around that. COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: Okay. Any objection from the committee with giving our folks the proper direction to go ahead and schedule the five walkovers -- five -- walkover of the five sites? MR. PRIDDY: I don't have a problem with that. I -- I have one question. What -- If -- If the property owner doesn't -- doesn't want us there at this point, how do we handle that? COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: You wouldn't suggest that to any of them though, would you, Russell? MR. PRIDDY: No. But I -- I know that one of them is going to fight that. The Barton Collier site probably won't, but I know Pacific Land Co. Is -- is going to raise a stink, and -- and their first stink is, you know, show me -- COHMISSIONER HANCOCK: Is there any pun intended there? MR. PRIDDY: No. COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: Jo, I assume that's your problem to deal with once we give you permission to go ahead and seek out the five sites? MR. SPEAR: Hmm-hmm. COHHISSIONER CONSTANTINE: Is there any -- any -- I didn't hear any objection from the committee. Okay. MR. STAIGER: Do we need a formal motion for it? COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: We'll be happy to take one. MR. CARPENTER: I move. MR. PRIDDY: Second. COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: Motion and a second. Any discussion on it? Seeing none, all those in favor state aye. Anybody opposed? Also, Jo, we'll need to schedule town meetings. So I assume the committee needs to make some sort of motion to give them permission to go ahead and schedule town meetings so we can get the input. MR. STALLINGS: So moved. COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: There's a motion -- MR. STAIGER: Second. COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: -- and a second by Dr. Stallings -- I'm sorry -- motion from Dr. Stallings, second from Dr. Staiger. Any objection? Seeing none, all those in favor, please state aye. Anybody opposed? And I really can't read the bottom thing there. MR. SPEAR: Consistent with your wishes, the tech memo -- tech memo two, bringing us up to date on committee activities will be delivered to the committee -- COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: On the 21st. MR. SPEAR: -- on the meeting of the 21st. MR. WILKISON: Which would be at Golden Gate Community Center? COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: I'll take your word for it. MR. WILKISON: It was the wishes of the committee that all the remaining meetings be at Golden Gate Community Center. COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: Okay. Anything else? MR. WILKISON: You have -- COHMISSIONER HANCOCK: Public comment. MR. WILKISON: -- public comment. COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: Public comment. CHAIRMAN NORRIS: Russell has something else. MR. PRIDDY: No. I'm done. CHAIRMAN NORRIS: You're done? COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: Bill -- How many people here -- I assume Bill. A1 probably does. Anybody else going to have public comment? Bill, why don't you just come on over by the podium and -- I don't think we're actually recording this. Yeah, we are. MR. BRAMBERG: Thank you. I'm Bill Bramberg. I -- I won't take any time. I -- I would like to see the list of the criteria, and I would like to see the exclusionary criteria that -- operated on College Properties if I could from the boys in the back room or whomever. COHMISSIONER HANCOCK: Bill, which site was -- MR. BRAMBERG: I do want to keep College Properties' property a candidate after you go through everything you have to go through. Thank you. COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: Thank you. A1. David, will you make sure we supply Mr. Bramberg with the information he just requested? MR. WILKISON: Yes. MR. PERKINS: A1 Perkins, Belle Heade Groups, citizens for constitutional property rights. I'm here representing Belle Heade and promoting the College Properties for a lot of good plain basic common sense reasons. First of all, the siting that you have just located up in this area here is upstream of all of the well fields. So if there's a problem, you people are going to live with it. Now, I didn't hear recycling out here at all. Now, we're talking about ten years out, and bear it in mind, you commissioners are being told what they want you to know. Now, as far as transportation over the road, from Marco Island here to there is 65 miles. Sixty-five miles to me is time on the road, impact on the road, insurance on the road, overtime, accidents. And, of course, you're going to put it right on Golden Gate as usual. Now, as far as College Properties goes, Belle Heade and southern Golden Gate Estates, due to the fact that the South Florida Water Management decides that they're going to flood that area and violate all the permits and back the water clear up into the -- into Bonita and along to the farms, when you have a problem with leachate, where is it going to go? Now, the point that I'm bringing out leachate, instead of digging a hole and putting your garbage in it, put your garbage up on top of a hill and collect the leachate. Put it under control. You've got the opportunity to fix the problem instead of pushing it around and making believe it will go away. Hauling costs. Told me it was $5 a -- $5 additional to each one of the people in Collier County. Lots of luck because I'm going to use Waste Hanagement's figures. It costs $60 an hour to operate the truck to pick up your garbage, and I'm sure that there's -- Steve will verify that. Now, I've got that from Waste Management. Point being, when you run a truck over the road for any length of time, you have to repair that truck. You have to put tires on it. And those trucks run early in the morning when the school buses are out. And, again, Golden Gate Estates is going to catch hell as usual. The College Properties being located where it is is an old farm that has cattle grazing on it right now. It is adjacent to two other farms which is downstream of the existing landfill. You have the option to monitor the wells and the leachate or any problems before it will even get to 41. Now, College Properties have been navigating waste recovery facility. Now, the State of Florida demanded that we go to 30 percent as this past January. It's going to go to 55 percent in another two years. And we can, along with composting, go to 97 percent. The additional 3 percent can be put into either building materials or roads just to get rid of it. I'm sure if we enter into a contract or even get an estimate from Waste Management what the additional cost is going to be to haul the garbage from Marco Island, Goodland up to Immokalee, you're going to find a considerable difference. College Properties are willing to support this. They want to participate with you in it, and they have the resources to -- to -- because they are very environmentally sensitive to this whole thing. We have the option to fix the problem, not hide it, not make it go away by some other means, like shipping it up the -- to Lee County. Right at the present time College Properties is the only willing seller. COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: One minute, A1. MR. PERKINS: Hey, $800,000, and some of it's my money. Believe me, I can run my mouth here and try to get this out for the people that I represent. COMMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: You know the rules, A1. One minute. MR. PERKINS: The people in the farming industry, first of all, are you going -- are the boys in the back room trying to put the farmers out of business, and are they trying to put the Mexicans and the blacks and all the rest of the disadvantaged people at a problem because they're going to put them out of a job? Now, is that one way -- Do you want to move them out of this county? COMMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: Jo, was that one of the criteria? MR. SPEAR: No. That's not a criteria. COMMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: Thank you. COMMISSIONER MAC'KIE: This is not the back room, A1. This is the front room, and girls are here. MR. PERKINS: Right. But apparently you've gotten handed -- You've been told by the boys from the back room exactly which way they want you to go. I think I've covered most all of this. You can't do it for $5. Just remember that it won't happen. Just remember, if you're upstream of the water and you have a problem such as we had when we had the flooding, you could have a problem all the way down through all of the well fields all the way down to Rookery Bay. Bear that in mind. Now, as far as the panther goes, the panther is going to be all over this place because if you flood it out, they have nothing to eat, so they will move in town and find somebody or something to eat. COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: Thank you, A1. One thing that A1 did point out and Bill pointed out, that they are willing sellers, and I don't know if there are other -- We haven't had any come forward, but I don't know if there will be any other willing sellers. It might be worth the while to assign our guys some criteria by which to look at willing sellers, not only here, but if somebody else comes back and somebody wants to come and sell us 1,000 acres to do this, let's put them in the same score system. I think you guys are one of the sites anyway but let's -- If somebody comes forward, show them exactly how the scoring process worked on that site. But if -- if anybody comes forward and says, "Gosh, we'd love to have it here," then it probably makes sense to have us look specifically -- use the same scoring criteria. MR. SPEAR: We need a map of the boundaries and the location. If we have that, we can go ahead and do what we did for all the other sites. COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: Bill, will -- will you get with Jo? I think you two or you three -- or one of these is yours anyway, but just make sure -- I think the boundaries they drew out is actually the boundaries of College Properties, but make sure -- If the two of you get together before you wander off, I think he can answer your question that you asked, and -- and they can give you the specific score. MR. BRAMBERG: I can't wander very far, Mr. Chairman. I couldn't get down here via 1-75 to begin with. COHMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: Did we have any other business? One more public speaker. MR. STOKES: I'm C.A. Stokes in Naples. It's my hope sometime to come before A1 rather than after. I never can speak so eloquently. I want to commend you again on the process you're going through to bring the public into this process at a very early stage and bring it in well. I have been a strong advocate of adequate landfill, as you know. We may have some differences of opinion over how long to operate the present landfill, but that's a question for another day. What I want to suggest to you today is that in your process of bringing the public along, you should think about telling the public what the possible uses are for this new site -- that is, the new kinds of ways to process waste that we know about today that are being developed. The progress in getting rid of -- or managing waste, I should say -- We never get rid of it. We just move it around. The -- The processes that have been developed and the techniques are very exciting, and I can clearly see even in my lifetime, which cannot extend as far as yours, that these things are going to mean that we will use virtually all of the waste that we now throw away for something. And I think if you could tell the public about that, say that we're considering this or that in the new landfill site, you will get a lot of excitement and interest and support. And the only caution would be let's don't tell them we're going to make silk purses out of sows here because it isn't quite that good, but I do think that we are looking forward to the day when we can make use of the waste. Thank you. COMMISSIONER CONSTANTINE: Thank you, Dr. Stokes. Anybody else wish to speak on this? If not, I don't think we have anything else we need to take care of. We're out of here. There being no further business for the good of the County, the meeting was adjourned by Order of the Chair at 4:25 p.m. BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS BOARD OF ZONING APPEALS/EX OFFICIO GOVERNING BOARD(S) OF SPECIAL DISTRICTS UNDER ITS CONTROL JOHN C. NORRIS, CHAIRMAN ATTEST: DWIGHT E. BROCK, CLERK These minutes approved by the Board on as presented or as corrected TRANSCRIPT PREPARED ON BEHALF OF DONOVAN COURT REPORTING BY: Christine E. Whitfield, RPR