Not without acrimony, solid waste board lowers fee for Sinclair demolition debris

Some $2 million less in federal tax dollars will be needed to dispose of asbestos-containing material from the soon-to-be-demolished Sinclair meatpacking plant after the board of the local solid waste agency agreed Tuesday to lower its charge for the material.

A Cedar Rapids firefighter sprays water on a smoldering fire at the Sinclair site from the ladder of one of the department's Quint trucks Dec. 17. (Jim Slosiarek/The Gazette)

The vote of the Cedar Rapids/Linn County Solid Waste Agency Board did not come without some contentious back-and-forth between city and county officials, which can sometimes occur on a board where Cedar Rapids City Hall controls six of the nine votes.

Cedar Rapids City Council member Chuck Swore, who heads up the council's Procurement Committee but is not an agency board member, told the board Tuesday that the central reason he asked the board to lower its landfill rates on asbestos-containing material was to save the federal government and federal taxpayers a substantial amount of money.

Swore had proposed that the agency lower its fee from $120 to $60 a ton for the estimated 65,000 tons of material, which would have saved federal taxpayers about $4 million, Swore said.

In the end, the board voted 5-3 to lower the rate to $90 a ton for a $2-million savings.

During the debate leading up to the vote, Swore said that anyone who would suggest that his motive was anything but saving money was “wacky."

Brent Oleson, the board's new chairman and a Linn County supervisor, shot back, saying it was not wacky to ask questions or to see the issue differently than Swore.

Oleson said city and county leaders had worked hard since the June 2008 flood to extract as much as they fairly could from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to ensure that the federal government was providing necessary disaster relief to help with the community's flood recovery.

He said the central reason that the city of Cedar Rapids wants to bill FEMA less for the Sinclair debris now is because of problems associated with a city bidding process, which the city resolved by throwing out the bids as a prelude to a new bidding round. The city wants to change its specifications for the new bids to avoid a lawsuit, and one of those changes is the landfill fees, Oleson said.

“I question whether this is all about saving money,” he said. Rather, it's about problems with a demolition contract, he said.

He and board members Jim Houser, a Linn County Supervisor, and Charlie Kress, a Marion parks commissioner, said the agency needed to keep its rate for asbestos-containing material at $120 a ton to make sure the agency was adequately protecting itself against some future liability related to the material.

In the end, though, Oleson said the matter came down to “raw political power” because the city of Cedar Rapids controlled six of the nine board votes.

In response, Swore said any insinuation from Oleson or anyone of “shenanigans” was wrongheaded. He took full credit for coming up with the idea to ask the agency to lower its rates after the city tossed out a first round of bids earlier this month on the Sinclair demolition contract.

In the bidding process, two of the eleven bidders brought to light how much less private, out-of-state landfills charge for asbestos-containing material, which raised questions locally about the rate that the local agency was charging to bury the Sinclair material in its Site 1 landfill, affectionately known as Mount Trashmore.

In part, the agency had based its rate on a $120-per-ton rate charged in Black Hawk County, though the landfill there, it turned out, charges $60 a ton for asbestos-containing material inside the county.

Board member Pat Ball, utilities director for the city of Cedar Rapids, pointed out that the local agency's per-ton rate of $120 was based on a review of the market and not on actual costs of handling the material. He noted that the agency's engineering firm now had figured the actual cost at $59.06 per ton, which covered operating costs to handle the material and costs related to closing the landfill and caring for it after closure.

An initial vote failed, 4-4, to lower the agency's asbestos rate to $75 a ton when Mark Jones, the city of Cedar Rapids' solid waste superintendent, joined Oleson, Houser and Kress in voting no. Jones subsequently proposed the $90 rate as a compromise figure, which passed on a 5-3 vote. Mark English, assistant Cedar Rapids fire chief, did not attend.

The $90-figure - which will put the cost of disposing of 65,000 tons of Sinclair debris at $5.85 million - will now become part of the bid specifications for the city's Sinclair demolition contract.