Debris pit permit not expected till fall

The Sundance City Council is now expecting that the timeline to obtain a permit for a new construction and debris pit will stretch into the fall.

“Working through the permitting schedule and my experience with the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), it’s going to be September or October before we have an approved permit,” said Travis Evans of Trihydro on Wednesday.

Evans further explained that the DEQ is instituting new standards and regulations, including for existing sources such as municipal landfills. Now that final grades for the landfill closure have been received and incorporated, he said, the permitting process can continue with this in mind.

This will require an update to the documents before they are submitted by the end of this month, Evans continued. The construction and debris pit will be permitted in accordance with the drafted revised rules in anticipation that they will be approved in January or February.

Fortunately, Evans said, this will not require significant changes to what has already been done. It will not be necessary to start over; the city will simply need to amend part of the application and most effort will be expended on updating the drawings to reflect as-built conditions.

The proposed timeline for the permit is a little longer than the one suggested at December’s meeting, when the council were surprised to hear that it could take six to eight months. Public Works Director Mac Erickson explained that the desire to secure a new pit is motivated by the fact that it is now costing the city more than it would like to haul debris to Gillette because it is difficult to properly fill the containers.

The DEQ has also mandated that monitoring must continue for the foreseeable future at the landfill site. New monitoring wells are expected to be installed this month, said Jeff Young of Trihydro.

On December 1, he continued, methane monitoring was completed for the fourth quarter. No methane was detected and the next field event will be in March for both groundwater and methane.

Young also reported on the landfill closure itself on Wednesday, telling the council that an agreement has finally been reached on a request from contractors EC Applications for $24,000 to remobilize and return to the site.

A final figure of $11,312 had been reached that very morning, said Young, and the DEQ has agreed to fund that amount. The associated change order will be executed within the contract and the council will then receive a clean-up change order with explanations for every over- and under-run from the original bid price, probably at next month’s regular meeting; meanwhile, the retainage for the contract will be released this week.

Young also addressed a request from Council Member Joe Wilson to see a detailed breakdown of engineering costs to date. He explained that this is available on every project update sent to the council and added a caveat:

“We’re required to be at ten percent or under on our engineering and we haven’t gone over the ten percent amount on the original bid,” he said, confirming that Trihydro is still working within the project estimates set up two years ago when the project began and there have been no engineering cost overruns.