City Council OKs contract for landfill improvements

By Jean Reid Norman

Monday, Aug. 17, 2009 | 1:59 a.m.

Boulder City has received a permit to expand its nearly full municipal landfill vertically by 25 feet. The expansion is just one of several improvements the City Council has planned for the crowded dump.

The permit approval from the Southern Nevada Health District allows the city to extend the life of its landfill until about 2011 without meeting stricter federal standards that require lining for new landfill cells, Glenn Savage, Southern Nevada Health District environmental health director, said.

The expansion, approved in March, will allow the elevation of the 10-acre landfill to rise to 2,454 feet. The previous permit limited the elevation to 2,430 feet, Public Works Director Scott Hansen said. The city sought a more than 20-foot increase to even out the top of the landfill, he said.

Without the expansion, the city landfill was in danger of filling up, City Manager Vicki Mayes has said.

The operation plan for expanding the landfill also includes drainage and road improvements, as well as creating slopes, Mayes told the City Council on Tuesday.

She asked the council to hire a consultant to oversee that work, and the council voted 3-1 to hire engineering firm Ninyo and Moore for a year at a cost of about $6,000 a month, with an option to extend the contract. Councilman Travis Chandler opposed the motion, and Councilwoman Linda Strickland was absent.

Mayes told the council that the city staff was stretched too thin to properly oversee the work.

“One of the biggest criticisms we’ve had through this whole landfill process is lack of oversight,” she said. “We don’t have a great deal of expertise within our office.”

Her hope is to begin to develop some of that expertise by working with Ninyo and Moore as it sets up a reporting system and training someone within the city to eventually take over the responsibility.

Chandler argued that the cost and responsibility of overseeing the expansion should fall to the landfill contractor, Boulder Disposal.

“We’re looking at somebody looking at a plan and following it,” he said. “The cost should fall upon the contractor.”

The city still plans to go to the Health District to ask to expand the landfill horizontally, into an area that had been used in the past for dumping, Hansen said. The city also plans to ask for variances to federal regulations based on the arid conditions of the landfill, Savage said.

Current federal regulations that call for multiple ways to control leakage were designed for areas in the Midwest, South and other places that have more rain and groundwater than Nevada, Savage said.

“We’ve had some good dialogue about it,” Savage said. “We know it’s coming.”