Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 | 6:00 am Adrian Nieoczym Kelowna.com:
The City of Kelowna is spending almost $5 million to upgrade a biosolids composting facility just outside of Vernon. The Kelowna-Vernon Biosolids Facility is located on Commonage Road. It takes waste from sewage treatment plants in the two municipalities and turns it into Ogogrow fertilizer. Design work to upgrade the facility has been going on since July, 2008 and the plan was to have the first phase of the upgrades in place by 2015. However, that plan is now being accelerated by five years. “We are loaded to capacity in terms of some components,” Kelowna’s manager of strategic projects, Mark Watt, told city council Monday afternoon when it approved the revised plan.
As well, residents living near the facility raised a stink with Vernon city council late last year over unpleasant odours emanating from the plant. The complaints resulted in a temporary cutback in the amount of waste being processed at the facility and a pilot program determined that upgrades would improve the smell as well as processing capacity.
The financial contribution of the two cities for the upgrade is based on the amount of waste each sends to the facility. Kelowna wanted to bring the Regional District of Central Okanagan on as a partner to help with the costs, but Vernon vetoed the idea. “It has to do with the volume of material,” said Kelowna Coun. Robert Hobson, who sits on the biosolids committee, in explaining Vernon’s decision. If the regional district had come onboard, then the facility would be required to handle waste from within its jurisdiction including West Kelowna and Vernon was worried that the facility would quickly exceed its expanded capacity. However, there is a chance that once the facility is upgraded, the regional district will become a fee paying customer.
But in the meantime, Kelowna is responsible for 70 per cent, or $4.85 million of the upgrade’s estimated $6.7 million price tag, which is $1.9 million more than the original plan. The cost increase is a result of the need for increased odour control including dedicated monitoring stations and additional biofilters and scrubbers. Watt said the upgrades, scheduled to be in place next spring, would allow the facility to handle Vernon and Kelowna’s needs until about 2016.
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