Minutes - Council - 07/14/1988 - Public Hearing

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Mike M~Clurken - 15855 Juniper Ridge Drive - Item #4 in Atlas' July 5 letter asks if the contract burn facility will burn unknown wastes and the answer was 'no'. It states that the materials are pre-packaged; manifest records are kept; a contract is drawn up before any material is accepted; material is analyzed; if it does not meet Atlas specs and MPCA boundaries, it will not be accepted; if it is acceptable, the material is shipped to Atlas under a manifest record system; Atlas will not handle any unknown material. The sampling Atlas takes to do the analysis will be a random, little piece of a large amount of material; it is a statistical sample; it is not a 100% sampling and that has inherent risks. If Atlas finds the material umacceptable, what happens to it then? Can the customer resubmit under a new manifest? This is a common trick for hospitals that are desperate to get rid of waste and Atlas wants their business because they get $I0 more per pound than they do for incinerating ordinary refuse. Ron Westby - 7059 166th Avenue - We seem to be jumping between two points of reference, the burning facility and the experimental facility. The one that really needs to be kept in mind is the experimental facility which would be consistently bringing in materials that have a guess factor of whether or not it will be a successful burn. I have been involved with state-of-the-art system designs for 15 years and am very informed on what it takes to design and put systems together. When setting up systems, you have a guess factor and you give it your best shot. That best guess wiI go up the smoke stack. Meanwhile, you breathe the air while they make their next guess. This is an experimental facility and we will be the recipients of good and bad gases. I am opposed to abortion and anything near to it; from what I understand, the hospital waste proposed to be burned can contain unborn children. I am not in favor of Atlas. Wendy Penna - 17310 Chameleon Street - Research and development means to test unknown~ and observe mistakes. In the meantime, we are sitting in the middle of it. Incineration is probably going to become a monumental thing in the future; something has to be done with the waste, but Atlas chose the wrong site. I am a member of 8TERN and we talked to toxicologists. They say you cannot compare the performance of this facility to any other in the world because it depends on the area an incinerator is located in. Maybe it won't work here even though they have been doing it in Holland for 50 years. A river valley is the worst site for any incinerator facility to be located because of the tendency for the air to sit there and not be carried off; thi~ makes it easier to pollute the water ~upply. You may have the safest facility in the world today but I am afraid there is nothing you can say that will convince me to live and raise my children by it. I did not move to Ramsey for the jobs and tax base. I got out of Minneapolis to find clean air and room to raise children and animals. Merrilyn Steiner - 6121 158th Lane - I lived in Los Angeles for two years and my eyes and throat hurt from the smog. I lived on Lowry Avenue in Minneapolis and put up with the exhaust from heavy traffic. I appreciate Ramsey's clean, fresh air. When you do research you don't know what is going to happen; you try things to see what will happen; no one can say what will happen. The air quality will be affected when you burn 38 tons per day, every day, year after year. At the present time, we have good air quality so let's not put it at risk. The decision to grant a conditional City Council Public Hearing/July 14, 1988 Page 10 of 15