Polk County Environmental Services has been working through several facility projects during the last couple of years from Crookston to Fosston. They recently closed the Fosston Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) project including final payment, while the Transfer Station project in Crookston remains open after substantial delays in Crookston.
Environmental Services Administrator Jon Steiner said there are still some punch list items to be addressed, but the county is also working on contractual issues with the project. “The building is substantially complete,” said Steiner. “We’ve been in it now for a while. But some things had to be pushed off until the summer, and we were told summer arrived, but it hadn’t arrived until recently. There are some things that we can now see have to be addressed yet, some punch list items left to down and settling up some of the contractual things that happened with missed deadlines and quality issues we experienced.”
The county has submitted their list of issues both with deadlines and quality to the contractor and is awaiting their response. Steiner said the hope is to avoid going to court. “I think it tends to be standard practice in these construction things when you have issues,” said Steiner. “One side feels they aren’t responsible for anything, and the other side feels that they are. Hopefully, you hit the middle ground as the alternative isn’t pretty, which is generally court. We’ll try to work with them and try to avoid that. Hopefully, they want to avoid that too.”
The county is also required to do stack testing for their air permits every three years. The MRF was expected to perform better after the equipment upgrade according to Steiner, and it did. “For the air permit we’re required to do stack tests everything three years,” said Steiner. “We had ours in April, and we were hoping they would come back good with the new equipment we have in Fosston. That seems to be the case as we got the results back and saw some major decreases in our emissions, which is good news. We saw our heavy metals drop 30 to 50 percent in some cases. The state also ties in a composition study for what is in the waste every five years with the air permit. That is going on this week. The state uses that data from our facility and other similar facilities to base their policies on for the next five years.”
Polk County recently updated its long-term outlook for the Gentilly landfill, and Steiner said that because of some nearby wetlands it had been requested they complete a flora and fauna study. “With landfills you plan long-term,” said Steiner. “Everybody wants to know how long it will be before you’re here and there in the landfill. We looked at what our footprint would be over the next 40 or 50 years, and there are some peripheral wetlands near there. Of course, if you have some wetland impacts, you need to try to mitigate it or replace those wetlands. That’s what we are looking at doing, and that’s a process through the Corps of Engineers along with the Soil and Water Conservation Office. They want to see a flora and fauna study looking at all the insects, critters, and plants around the property. Because different insects fly at different times and different weeds or plants bloom at different times, you have to do this throughout the summer.”
If the study is completed without any surprises, Steiner says the county should be able to start prepping the area for future growth. “Whether we’re looking for Lady Slippers or Prairie Fringed Orchids or certain species of bat, or rust colored bumblebees,” said Steiner. “Those are things they are looking for out there. They’ve done one already, and we have another one going on in a week or so weather depending. Depending on what they find, we might be doing some into the fall. Hopefully, that goes well without any surprises, and we can start moving forward on equipment.”
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