city news
january11
Vernonia City News...
At the January 3, 2011, City Council
Meeting:
Council Takes Care of New Business--
City Recorder Joann Glass read the
Oath of Office to newly elected Mayor,
Josette Mitchell, and newly elected City
Councilors, Willow Burch and Marilyn
Nicks. Following the Oath of Office, all
three new Council members took their
seats on the dais and began their terms
of office.
City Councilor Kevin Hudson
was selected as Council President. The
Council President presides over any
Council business in the event that the
Mayor is unable to perform the duties of
her office.
Council also authorized new
mayor Mitchell to sign checks for city Council Approves Extension for
payroll and accounts payable.
DAD’S Recycling-- Based on a request
from City Planner Carole Connell,
Council Ratifies Professional Services Council approved a thirty-day extension,
Contract-- Council ratified the due to extenuating circumstances, for
Professional Services contract extension DAD’S Recycling to complete required
with Columbia Pacific Economic improvements at their new location on
Development (ColPac) for the services Mist Drive.
of Bill Haack as Interim pro tem City
Administrator. The previous Council Council Approves Liquor License
approved the contract extension, but Request-- Council Approved a Liquor
Mayor Mitchell stated that according to License request from Lucky Family,
city legal council, when a majority of Inc., which is a change of business
council is replaced, the sitting council name by New Hong Kong Restaurant.
cannot bind the new council to a contract. Interim Police Chief Mike Connor
Council ratified the extension, 4-0, with recommended approving the license as
he has no record of major incidents or
Councilor Marilyn Nicks abstaining.
2011
5
patterns of incidents under the former
business name.
Council Approves Funds for Airport
Gravel-- Council approved Resolution
01-11, a transfer of $240 from the
Airport Contingency Fund to the Airport
Miscellaneous Fund for gravel to be
placed on Airport Road.
The next regularly scheduled City
Council Meeting has been moved from
January 17th to Tuesday January
18th at 7:00 P.M. in observance of
the Martin Luther King Holiday. A
Council Work Session is being planned
for 6:00 P.M. on January 18th before
the Council meeting.
Need For A Water and Sewer Rate Study In Vernonia
The City of Vernonia Public
Works Committee, the City Engineer,
and the Interim City Administrator have
worked together the past few months to
look closely at the current utility rates
and weigh the need to modify the rate
structure in the near future.
Prior to the flood in 2007,
the Vernonia City Council and City
Administrator Dick Kline formed the
Vernonia Public Works Committee. It
was anticipated at that time that the
Public Works Committee would make
regular reports to the public about the
City’s public works systems and the
utility rates that pay for them. It is our
hope that these reports can provide you,
the public, with some of the complex
information we, our engineers and the
City Council must digest as we make
decisions that impact the utility rates.
From the beginning, the sewer
project has been the 800-pound gorilla
in the room. For most of the last two
decades, Vernonia has been under
an enforcement order from Oregon
Department of Environmental Quality
(DEQ) because our sewer system pollutes
the Nehalem River. Two years prior to
the flood, the city started a project that
included new pump lines and stations
and the purchase of the millsite for
effluent disposal. We paid for this with
Community Development Block Grant
(CDBG) grant funds and DEQ loan
financing. We currently owe $6,487,923
on DEQ Loan #R93462 (combined
principle and interest). Like so many of
the other development activities around
Vernonia, the second serious flood in 12
years has forced the city to reconsider its
plans.
Over the past four years, the
succession of city administrators and
turnover in our public works department,
with the resulting “churning” of the
City’s plans for sewer upgrades, caught
this essential project in a stranglehold.
Recently, as a result of a “pre-pre-
engineering” report by the engineering
firm Brown and Caldwell, we are
getting much closer to understanding
the way forward. Earlier this year,
members of the City Council, Interim
City Administrator Haack and several
members of the City of Vernonia Public
Works Committee, met with Brown and
Caldwell, DEQ and a consulting firm
retained by DEQ. The agenda included a
review of Brown and Caldwell’s report,
as well as a brainstorming session to find
additional ways to reduce Brown and
Caldwell’s estimated cost of the project
and its impact on utility rates. As we
understand it, the steps between us and a produced in Step 8.
completed sewer project are as follows: 10. Construct the project.
Pre-pre-engineering:
1. Brainstorm different project ideas.
The ideas considered so far include:
abandoning the lagoons completely and
building a treatment plant, a combination
of those two models, wetlands treatment
systems (inside and outside the lagoons),
effluent management systems like poplar
farming, etc.
2. Retaining an engineer to advise the
city about the feasibility of these options.
3. Settling on the best design idea
developed by the public works committee
and its engineers, and producing an
estimate of the cost to make that idea
real.
Pre-Engineering:
4. Using the final idea emerging from
Step 4, further improve the resolution of
the plans and designs.
5. Provide another estimate based on
these refined designs.
6. Reconsider funding opportunities and
estimate the impact on utility rates.
7. If indicated, revisit Steps 1 through 6.
Engineering:
8. Prepare full design documents
and specifications for the project that
emerged from Step 7. These documents
need to be so well-designed and written,
that they can be publicly bid and limit
the opportunity for contractors to find
loopholes from which to gain a change
order. (It is these change orders that
push our fully funded budgets into the
red.)
9. Bid and contract the design documents
City Information
and Updates
Available by
Email
Citizens who wish to receive
meeting information and
updates can request to be placed
on an email list at City Hall. If
you would like to receive city
information by email, please
contact Joann Glass at joann@
vernonia-or.gov and asked
to be placed on the “Citizen
Notification List.”
Vernonia may never see a
more opportune time for it to complete
the sewer project. The interest and
sympathy of the public sector, beginning
with the Governor, has left Vernonia
with historic levels of state and federal
interest in helping us. This includes
City problems like the sewer treatment
system. It seems unlikely that the city
will ever again have the level of outside
support available to it right now. At the
same time, construction costs in general
have taken a dip after the real estate bust
of 2008. We will probably never see a
cheaper time to build the sewer project
that we need to bring us into compliance.
Finally, the standards that will govern
that projects design may be on the verge
of changing. The regulatory agencies
are beginning to recognize entirely new
categories of “pollutant” that must be
eliminated from the waste stream. These
are very common compounds which
will be hard to remove. They include
pharmaceuticals, birth control hormones,
caffeine, and even cholesterol. Any new
system built after these rules get adopted
will need to be much more sophisticated
and expensive.
So, what does all this mean for
sewer rates? Unfortunately, it means
they will go up. At this point, we don’t
know how much. However, we are
currently accruing interest on $4,341,153
of expended principle and have accrued
to date $2,146,770 on this open DEQ
loan. That interest is being added to our
balance, accruing additional interest. It’s
not unlike having a credit card bill and
making no payments. The balance just
goes up and up. We need to complete
our project as soon as possible to convert
this higher-interest rate debt to DEQ into
lower-cost, long-term municipal debt.
Obviously, this cannot happen for a year
or two. In the meantime, the Public
Works Committee will recommend that
the City Council rededicate the soon-
to-expire $12 per month water payment
surcharge as a sewer surcharge to begin
paying against the interest accrual on the
outstanding DEQ loan amount.
No one in this process, not the
engineers, not DEQ, not the Council,
let alone the Public Works Committee,
has a crystal ball that would let us know
exactly the right way to proceed. What
we do know is that doing nothing will
lead to a DEQ enforcement action, and is
likely to be the worst possible alternative.
The next article will discuss the
alternative wastewater systems that were
considered in the process of selecting
a desired option to take forward into
final engineering. At this time, the city
anticipates selecting a project manager,
a project engineer, completing a rate
study, conducting geotechnical analysis
of the soils at the lagoons and upgrading
existing pumping stations to protect
them from flood damage in a future
high-water event. Over the next year,
we will provide more information on
each of these elements of the wastewater
project as they develop.
This article was provided by the City of
Vernonia – Public Works Committee.
The values used are current as of De-
cember 2010.
