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04/28/2021 Regular MeetingSOLID WASTE ADVISORY BOARD REGULAR MEETING MINUTES April 28, 2021- 5:30 PM Kodiak Island Borough Assembly Chambers Call to Order Chair Szabo called the regular meeting to order at 5:30p.m. on Wednesday April 28th, 2021. Roll Call P. Valerio conducted a roll call, a quorum was established. Board members present were Chair Nick Szabo, Doug Hogan, Jason Jardine, Nathan Svoboda, Terri Pruitt, and Patrick Cummings. Andie Wall was absent. Others present were Kodiak Island Borough School District Student Representative Bralyn Nixon, Kodiak Island Borough Solid Waste Manager Jena Hassinger, and Kodiak Island Borough Finance Director Dora Cross, Kodiak Island Borough Assembly Member Aimee Williams, Threshold President Chris Lynch, Alaska Waste Manager David Edwards, USCG Environmental Chief Jennifer Nutt, and Visitor Nicholas Mangini. PRUITT MOVED to excuse Andie Wall for being absent. HOGEN seconded. VOICE VOTE ON MOTION CARRRIED UNANIMOUSLY. Approval of Agenda HOGEN MOVED to approve the agenda. PRUITT seconded. VOICE VOTE ON MOTION CARRRIED UNANIMOUSLY. Approval of Minutes HOGEN MOVED to approve the minutes of March 31, 2021. PRUITT seconded. VOICE VOTE ON MOTION CARRRIED UNANIMOUSLY. Visitor Comments: Nicholas Mangini — Recycling Pickup Business Discussion Items: A. Goal Setting and Strategic Planning: Andie Wall wanted to add this to the agenda. Chair Nick Szabo and Terri Pruitt discussed this in detail. The goal is to get the Board members to better participate in activities for Outreach. Outreach is the primary focus of the Board. To make it easier on everyone the weight needs to be shared. Terri and Andie will come up with a project/task list and ask for help from the Board in a more organized way. Andie being absent there will be more discussion on this later. 1 B. Outreach Chair Nick Szabo began this discussion with wanting to thank the local media outlets for all their hard work and excellent efforts to get the word out there on Household Hazardous Waste Event. Jason Jardine said that there are banners up at Walmart. Doug Hogen was able to get in contact with the Alaska State Dept. of Transportation who is doing the project on the bridge and they said that they would put up a message on their big digital sign which is parked right outside the High School. The Middle School has also agreed to put an ad/verbiage on their digital sign. He would like to reach out to the High School again and see if they could put something on their digital sign as well. Jena Hassinger Solid Waste Manager and Patricia Valerio Engineering and Facilities (EF) Secretary and staff for the Board, made a small presentation about the efforts completed by EF department. We ordered and received the tote bags to hand out, two colors yellow and green. Coloring books are done —Thanks to Chris Lynch and Threshold for seeing that through. EF has all the coloring books in their office and we will find out more details of how to get them out to students soon. EF would like to have a meeting with the School Board or go to a School Board meeting to find the best way to distribute. EF Dept. has been emailing, posting, doing radio ads and some hotline spots to get the word out there. NRC has told us that we have a pretty good number of commercial businesses set up with appointments. EF has received a few phone calls from the public asking about the residential hazardous waste event. All of which is great because it means people are thinking. Chair Nick Szabo started to discuss the Relocation Packets for the USCG and Discover Kodiak. Asking if advertising there to inform folks about Threshold would be acceptable. Which transitioned us into the Threshold Services update. C. Threshold Services — Chris Lynch Chris Lynch got up and responded to the comments about the Relocation Packets. Threshold's advertising budget is spent in other places. In response to the question if SWAB could take out an ad or share information for Threshold in other places that is acceptable, as long as the information is accurate. Chris also detailed Threshold's involvement in the Household Hazardous Waste Event. They will have their van in the parking lot and will be able to accept any and all recyclables. And normally recycling electronics costs the public $10 per piece, they will be accepting them at the event for free. Threshold is involved with the Kodiak Island School District State of Alaska Resource Rooms Programs. They are employing high school kids with barriers to help encourage 2 them and get them ready to join the work force full time. The High School has also been employing kids to collect the recycling and consolidate it to one location for pick up. Threshold is very happy to be a part of it and continue to meet their mission. Chris discussed the market prices currently. Cardboard is still the steadiest and is fluctuating between $70-250 per ton. They have more buyers now which is great. Threshold has a very clean product and ships out about six 40ft containers per month. The discussion changed to focusing on the relocation packets and Aimee Williams spoke for the Discover Kodiak. The packets are complete and available now for this year. SWAB will have to wait until next year to introduce an ad to the packets. Jennifer Nutt spoke about the programs on the USCG Base and the fact that the USCG has a different contractor for recycling. Visitor Comments: None Board Member Comments: N. Svoboda — Could we do "Thank You" Letters to everyone who helped out with the coloring book? Small discussion. Staff will send out addresses of all involved. Thank you all for the efforts toward the coloring book and outreach. D. Hogen — Can the opening on the cardboard dumpsters be wider? David Edwards answered that no, any wider and we would start seeing trash being thrown in. T. Pruitt —Hoping you [Nick Mangini] find out good news about what you want to do. Maybe check out what other communities are doing. J. Jardine — Can we get an update on what materials are coming into Threshold? See if there is any trends. Is our outreach helping? P. Cummings — None. B. Nixon — None. J. Nutt —None. J. Hassinger—None. N. Szabo — Tuesday May 4th at 12:30pm is Talk of the Rock. Also, I want to make a clarification from the last meeting about gasification and waste to energy. That can take on various forms it could be super incineration or gasification. So, a lot of people want to use the waste heat or gas generated off it. This contract with the EPA to do a study of whether Kodiak would be suited to do waste to energy, the only problem with adding in the energy part is that we don't need any energy. KEA (Kodiak Electric Association) has more energy than they are going to sell in the next 20 or 30 years. Unless you could get KEA to buy in on some type of energy by-product there is no way the Borough could set up its own powerline system, transmission system, and generate energy to compete with KEA. So, if the thing is going to focus on waste to energy someone is 3 going to say "Oh, well Kodiak doesn't need any more energy" why are they spending millions of dollars on this. I would like to also see the study focus on the gasification versus the landfill. We have spent millions, and millions, and millions of dollars on this landfill and we still haven't quit spending. The leachate plant was supposed to take care of treating the leachate and we have had problems with that. We are spending more and more money all the time. We spent over one hundred thousand dollars on fines from DEC because apparently the staff cannot keep up with the paperwork that it takes to keep the landfill working. If we had a gasification system here we could not only take care of the regular flow of garbage that we are dealing with, we could also start mining the existing landfill. If it was big enough, we could eliminate the landfill all together. We could burn up everything in the landfill and we would not have to file annual reports and everything. So, that's why I think the study should not just focus on waste to energy it should also focus on whether its feasible to get rid of the landfill and do a different process as far as dealing with solid waste. Jena Hassinger responded to Nick's comments: First it was not a contract, it was a grant and I'm the one that applied for it. It had different options of what you could do for this waste energy project. So, we could look at feasibility, cost, different options for different waste energy operations. It was supposed be done in three days, but they said that they would let me know if we received the grant. Apparently, they had too many applications and they said it would be about a month until they get back to me to let us know if we would be selected. I made sure in our application for the grant to specify that we use mostly wind energy here. So, that was noted so that we could find out if it is cost effective for us. Also, our fines were not just because of staff error, we received fines because our permit limits were not met. Leachate is ever changing and eventually it should level out. But things you put in the landfill can consistently change, so most likely you will have to upgrade your plant to treat what is coming in. Nick: I understand. I just read through the whole long list of fines and a lot of is was not filing reports and not doing employee training and a lot of other things. I'm just saying that we should keep in mind that there might be better ways to handle solid waste than putting it in a landfill. That's all. Meeting Schedule — Tuesday May 18t", 2021. Adjournment HOGEN MOVED to adjourn. PRUITT seconded. VOICE VOTE ON MOTION CARRRIED UNANIMOUSLY. The meeting was adjourned at 6:42p.m. 0 SU TTED BY: su7 Pat icia Valerio, Board Secretary KIB Engineering/Facilities Department APPROVED BY: r Nior V Szabo, Chair 21 Solid Waste Advisory Board Date: zej� Date: //S /'Va