With the Materials Recovery Facility in Fosston operation using its new equipment Polk County Environment Services will trade-in the old equipment from the 1990s that was replaced said Environmental Services Director Jon Steiner. “We’ve been talking with Titus about some of the old equipment that we had from the old system that was put in back in the ‘90s,” said Steiner. “There is still some value to that especially if it gets to the right parties. We looked at trading that with Titus MRF Services the company we contracted with for our current system and they’ve been talking with Becker County just south of us about reusing it down there.”
Because of Becker County’s interest in the equipment, Polk County will be able to get some money out of the deal, while Becker County recycles the equipment. “It’s ironically recycling, recycling equipment,” said Steiner. It’s a good thing for everyone. We come out with a little bit more money and Becker County can get into something relatively cheap.”
The trade-in on the equipment is valued at $200,000 with a $29,704 payment by Polk County to prep the equipment for sale to Polk County. That includes an additional $9,704 to remove the facility now rather than wait for Becker County’s grants to come in for the equipment later this year. “Part of the trade-in was [Titus] wanted to wait until Becker County was ready before they came up and did the punch list,” said Steiner. “The punch list is going through the list of things that need to be corrected or tuned or addressed to close out their portion of the project. We need them up here to do that but the weather and site conditions haven’t cooperated. So, we’ve got all this heavy used metal equipment that needs to go elsewhere buried under piles of snow, froze to the ground. We couldn’t wait for them, we needed to get that temporary equipment that is still on our tip floor off of it so we can open up our operations more.”
The Materials Recovery Facility will also fill their staff in the coming weeks, as they’ve intentionally worked short-staffed to evaluate the new equipment and it’s staffing needs. “We didn’t fill all the positions for the Material Recovery Facility in Fosston,” said Steiner. “We wanted to make that the equipment was performing the way we needed it to, evaluate how many people we needed and then hire once we had that figured out. The last thing we want to do is hire people and then figure out we didn’t need all the people and let them go. Usually, the people we hire are employed so we don’t want them quitting their previous job and then we let them go.”
There are still a few procedural things to be completed with the Polk County Commissioners before the positions can be hired, but Steiner was given consent Tuesday to begin advertising the openings. “Our crew has been trying to pick up the slack on being short-staffed,” said Steiner. “But that only goes so far and at some point your hurting yourself. There are some procedural things that need to happen, so we’ll start advertising for that and procedurally come back in a couple of weeks and get the approval to fill the positions.”
