Agenda - 02-19-2002 - 9a - Laserfiche WebLink

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10 • Could inadvertently encourage landclearing if made too accommodating or inexpensive. • Difficulty identifying legitimate farm landclearing activity from landclearing activity conducted as a prelude to development. Ifservice to be offered only to agriculture community, a clear definition or method of identifying legitimate farming operations must be developed. • May be legally obligated to provide this service for the non-agriculture community rather than restricting to the agriculture community only, especially if Solid Waste Enterprise Fund is used. • This option would allow the department to move the grinder much less frequently, avoiding the additional costs ofgrinding on-site and the complications involved with transporting the large grinder and the issues relating to operating on private property. Cost: • Considerable cost involved acquiring and mobilizing equipment. The equipment needed to provide these off-site grinding operations(and which is identical to the equipment listed in #3) would include: • Excavator- $185,000 • Low-boy Trailer- $25,500 • Dump Trailer- $38,000 Total Additional Equipment Cost = $248,500 • Other miscellaneous costs would include fuel, maintenance, supplies, lease of tractor, etc. • Costs associated with providing this non-landfill fund related service would need to be reimbursed to the fund either through the recovery of costs from fees or subsidized by some other public entity, unless the service is made available to the public at large. • It is likely that the loading and hauling service only could be provided with one additional position at an estimated cost of$35,000 1annually. • This option does not preclude some governmental financial assistance/subsidy. • According to the County Attorney, if Board wishes to make this service available to both the agriculture community as well as the non-agriculture community, it could do so using Solid Waste Management Fund expenditures. Alternatively, if the Board wishes only to provide this service to the agriculture community, some method of reimbursement to the Solid Waste Management Fund or alternate source of funding would be required. • Fees could be based on either an hourly rate,per acre or job rate and could be based on any number of variables such as quantity of material to be ground, location of farm and difficulty to get to, whether large stumps are to be included in material, estimated level of annual demand for this service, etc. Note: It would be difficult to predict a fee schedule for this particular option at this point without some additional guidance from the Board and additional analysis by staff. Board input on the whether this service would be available to only the agriculture community or also would be available to the non-agriculture community is important. Once reliable cost estimates are developed staff will provide them to the Board. 5. Ordinance could allow air curtain burning(also called pit burning). Description: This option would result in an approach to the prohibition on open burning by not including air curtain type burning under the definition of open burning. A brief description of the type burning has been provided by Air Burners, LLC, a manufacturer of air curtain equipment as Attachment A. 8