City hires new consultant for landfill work

By Cassie Tomlin

Thursday, Oct. 9, 2008 | midnight

The city will hire a new consulting firm to help it draft permits to expand the municipal landfill.

The former consultant, HDR, was fired in August, City Manager Vicki Mayes said.

HDR helped the city resubmit its application to the Southern Nevada Health District Sept. 4 to pile trash 20 feet higher on 10 acres of the landfill, which would add three to four years to the landfill's life, Mayes said.

But the city needs to permit the entire 74 acres at the municipal landfill, which requires a consultant to perform a hydrology study, Mayes said.

The city paid HDR $300,000 to draft the permits and terminated the contract because work was slow, she said.

On Aug. 26, the City Council directed Public Works Director Scott Hansen and City Attorney Dave Olsen to study landfill operations with HDR after a debate over a February council directive to hire an outside consultant to look at the landfill.

Mayes said she found out the next day the contract with HDR had been terminated and told the council in a memo Aug. 28.

Mayes said the city sent a letter to HDR Aug. 20 with an ultimatum to finish its work quickly, and HDR sent one back Aug. 26 or 27 acknowledging the contract was terminated.

"I knew we'd sent the either/or letter," she said. "We'd had long conversations about terminating the contract."

At the Sept. 23 City Council meeting, Mayes said she didn't expect the Health District to decide on the permits for the 10-acre site for months. The city is looking for a new consultant for the hydrology study and for other landfill studies that could arise in the permitting process.

Hansen said Oct. 6 that the landfill has another three to four years of life, but earlier this year, city staff predicted the landfill would be full by spring of this year. Hansen said he didn't expect the city to run out of space in the landfill before it could be get the new permits.

The city's application is being reviewed and will reveal how much more space the city has in the landfill and how much time it has until the landfill is full, Walter Ross, environmental health engineer and supervisor for the Health District, said. Ross could not estimate when the Health District would finish reviewing the permits.

In the meantime, the landfill, which is run by Boulder Disposal, has failed Health District inspections, Mayes said.

For at least a year, the intermediate cover has been deemed inadequate, and the Health District has found the landfill in violation. That is partly because the municipal dump was built before modern standards for landfills were enacted, Mayes said.

"We have all of those older areas where there has been waste deposited that we haven't addressed," she said.

Until the city knows what the Health District will permit on the city's new applications, the landfill operator won't pile layers of dirt where garbage could be buried, she said.

The city's contract does not require Boulder Disposal to meet Health District rules, she said.

Olsen has studied the city's contract with Boulder Disposal, operator of the municipal landfill, looking for defaults, and Mayes told the council Sept. 23 there were two potential breaches in Boulder Disposal's, contract.

The potential problems are that the contract calls for composting to be done and recycling to be sorted, and Boulder Disposal does not compost and has single stream recycling, Mayes said. The council did not call a vote to find the operator in breach.

Mayes had no explanation for the recycling program, but said the operator doesn't compost, because the previous operator had stopped.

"Things have changed over time from what that contract originally anticipated," she said.

Since the contract was written 10 years ago, the city has found the organic material unusable and unable to be sold. Mayes said she's studying how composting could be re-implemented so the organic waste is put to use and doesn't just go back into the landfill.

Cassie Tomlin can be reached at 948-2073 or [email protected].