The Wastewater Facility Upgrades and a Digester

On Tuesday night, Common Council heard the proposed cost of wastewater upgrades ($18.7 million) and the separate possibility of large digester.

Let’s be clear about what a big digester’s “solids treatment” truly is: a process of importing other cities’ unwanted manure, human excrement, and industrial filth into Whitewater. 

A few quick comments, as there is much to consider here, with more documents to review. 

A Big Digester is Infeasible…and That’s Just the Start of Its Risks.  Donohue Engineering (consultant to the City of Whitewater) makes clear that the cost of a full-sized digester would be fantastically high — $12.4 million total, $810,000 in annual debt costs, with a net annual loss to the city of almost $400,000 per year. 

That project would be both fiscally wasteful for local government, and economically and environmentally dangerous for Whitewater. 

One will need to see both the Trane and Donohue documents (rather than a few slides) in full to consider the many other problems and risks there are to a big digester proposal. 

It’s such a profligate idea that no one seems to have the stomach to push for that big digester project.

A Waste of Whitewater’s Time and Money Over a Big Digester Proposal.   Honest to goodness, every moment and every cent this city spent on Trane’s hawking of a digester proposal was time and money wasted.

That Donohue now sensibly shows the fiscal infeasibility of Trane’s grandiose idea is the only good thing to come out of the proposal. That plan would have been worse than fiscally infeasible, of course: the real problems are economic (not just to local government’s fiscal account), environmental, and (consequently) political and legal. 

We will be a safer, more desirable, more harmonious community without a digester.

What Tipping Fees for a Small Project Really Mean.  If Wastewater Superintendent Reel or anyone else in government is looking for the ‘baby step’ of a small digester with ‘tipping charges,’ then he can expect to be accountable for what all of that supply of waste from other cities means for our city – there’s not the slightest chance that anyone deserves an easy pass on this point.

Mr. Reel’s Enthusiasm for a Digester.  In meetings over the last year, beginning in December 2013, continuing in January, February, and thereafter in 2014, Wastewater Superintendent Reel pushed the idea of a grand digester with almost giddy enthusiasm. 

He could not have been more mistaken in his big-project excitement; his boosterism has ill-served Whitewater.  One sees that Donohue Enginerering has made that much clear. 

Ignoring economic risks (or leaving unstated environmental and health ones) has never served any community. 

Beyond all this, Mr. Reel should have given far more consideration to the costs of the utility upgrades wholly apart from a digester.  If $18.7 million is a lot (and it is), then it should be obvious that another $12 million for a money-losing digester is absurd. 

From presentations over the last year, one sees that success in analyzing costs and risks depends on capable, competent consultants.  I think it’s fair to say that Mr. Reel was ill-suited to assess many aspects of these projects, and that in the presence of less-capable consultants (the second- and third-tier team Trane sent to us), his enthusiasm exceeded his judgment. 

Even now, he’s not the least chagrined – he candidly admits that he’s experimented with using industrial – not agricultural – wastes at the plant in the past, and would like to move forward if he somehow could.  

Funny, that although Superintendent Reel has tried some of this before, he goes on that “my plug, has always been, if we don’t try we’ll never know.  We have a lot of room to bring product in.” 

Honest to goodness, he’s blithe, and speaks of all this like a student’s science project.  (So one may be very clear: Whitewater is not this gentleman’s ill-conceived science project.) 

Far from being reassuring, his discussion of these proposals only makes one less confident in his judgment.     

Although a big digester project’s likelihood thankfully fades, fair concerns about the shallow way this wastewater superintendent has flacked the idea over the last year, clings to it even now, and has left details of the separate utility upgrade unclear until even this late date, are more obvious than ever.