The Polk County Commissioners met Tuesday morning at the Polk County Transfer Station.
The commissioners heard from Mark Dietz (Polk County Facilities) and Andy Larson (Polk County Corrections) with an update on the condition of the Juvenile Center after water damage less than two weeks ago. Dietz told the commissioners that the non-secure side of the building would have to be gutted. The earliest they could have the project started would be in the fall at the earliest. “We have had this happen to us twice now, where we are replacing a roof, and we get a rain event, and it was a big one. It pretty much washed everything out of the building, so we are cleaning it out,” said Polk County Administrator Chuck Whiting. “I was in there Monday, studs are being taken out, there is no power in the building, the kids have been moved to other facilities in northwest Minnesota.”
Whiting said the County’s insurance is working with the roofing company’s insurance. “We’ve had our insurance adjusters in. Our insurance company is working with the roofer’s insurance company, we are trying to get the roof done, and the workers are doing that, and we have the cleanup contractors in,” said Whiting. “We informed the board about everything, and we have to wait and see what the costs are going to be for repairing everything and getting it back up to snuff. It will probably take the rest of the year to get that facility back up and running.”
Whiting also went through the 2022 budget outlook with the commissioners. “We have a number of things that are routine, including our labor contracts to negotiate. We have to deal with our recovery money we have been given and how to use that,” said Whiting. “How are we going to keep the levy from going up to much, we have some staffing changes, and we will be seeing a lot of retirements over the next few years, so we are doing some succession planning and positioning people for success going forward.”
The Commissioners approved a passive gas vent system at the Polk County Landfill at the cost of $54,850 from Zavorals of East Grand Forks. The county saves about $10,000 because Kittson County is doing the same project, and they will be done at the same time. “As we plan for the construction of the new landfill cell next year, we purchased ahead of time the cover for the existing portion of the landfill. That will keep the water and the snowmelt out of the waste, and we purchased it when it was cheap last winter. There is another landfill doing the same work, and now we have to put these gas vents in the landfill before we put the cover over the top so we can allow the gas inside to get out,” said Polk County Environmental Services Director Jon Steiner. “We are doing that in conjunction with the Markit landfill (which serves Marshall and Kittson County), so we got a quote for that, and we both will save for doing it at the same time.”
Steiner talked about the need for wetland replacement credits at the landfill, and the board approved the purchase. “Part of our permit that we got in 2015, we had the footprint for the landfill for about the next 50 years. Included in that is some wetlands in the area, and it has been quite the process in figuring out what we have to do there with all the agencies involved,” said Steiner. “We had an impact from a borrow pit north of the area from years ago that we have to deal with, and the state decided they want us to separate the two, and we went to the board to get approval to purchase wetland credits for under one acre of the impact that we had from eight years ago.”
Like many businesses, Polk County Environmental Services is having a tough time finding workers, and they are looking at other options to fill the job openings. Steiner informed the board they are looking into the possibility of having robots do some of the work. “We have to keep the facility in Fosston running, so we are looking into some automated equipment, which they refer to as robots, that could do some of the work for us if we can’t find people to do it,” said Steiner. “We did two things. We put in a grant request like we did when we built the new transfer station in Crookston and the improvements we did in Fosston. That is more of a long-term thing, so we put in an earmark for doing a whole project over there for robotics and some other upgrades. We may have to do something now in the short term, so we are meeting with some robotics companies to see what they can do. We are about five to six people short over there, so we don’t have much room to lose somebody else, and we would have to stop operations.”
