‘A Truck Loop Specified for Heavy Truck Traffic’

Post 60 in a series. When Green Turns Brown is an examination of a small town’s digester-energy project, in which Whitewater, Wisconsin would import other cities’ waste, claiming that the result would be both profitable and green.

I mentioned that I would look at a few more aspects of Whitewater’s 12.15.15 meeting on wastewater upgrades and waste importation, perhaps also addressing a few scattered topics, and then collect my set of questions, and pose requests at law where additional information is needed. Those few posts also allow time to upgrade the WHEN GREEN TURNS BROWN website, and get it ready for a proper launch. There’s much to do after these questions are collected, and it makes sense to progress more quickly and firmly. Whitewater’s Common Council may take some action on the project in March, but the more one looks at this project, the less reasonable it is to consider the project primarily as a local matter. Local actions are illustrative for comparisons with other communities.

In the video below, a representative of the Donohue engineering firm, a firm paid over one million dollars for consulting on the project in addition to the twenty-million construction cost, describes the location of the plant for the purposes of importing waste:

“Located out on a truck loop really speci…specified for heavy truck traffic….”

I’ve embedded the clip through Vine, as I’m interested in ways to present brief remarks from public meetings (apart from this series). It’s set to load automatically but is not set to play audio automatically. (At least to my mind at this time, autoplaying audio seems jarring. An alternative presentation method would be to allow audio autoplaying initially but mute it after a few days’ time of the clip being on my sites. The advantage of short clips, of course, is that they capture brief but telling remarks. As it is now, one can click the speaker button on the video’s lower right corner to hear the audio.)

Today’s questions begin with Number 292. All the questions in this series may be found in the Question Bin.

Here are a few questions about the Donohue representative’s remarks:

292. What’s the maximum truck volume that this project can accommodate as presented?

293. What’s the actual truck volume that this project would require even under its initial formulation?

294. Why does the Donohue representative (Nathan Cassity) expressly mentions that waste importation would take place on ‘a truck loop really specified for heavy truck traffic’ if he didn’t think that available capacity was relevant and material to the project? (The alternative, it seems, would require one to believe that Mr. Cassity simply utters irrelevant and immaterial remarks in public meetings. If the alternative should improbably be true, perhaps Whitewater’s local government might ask for a discount on the million-plus consulting fee.)

295. After well over a two years of discussions and presentations about waste importation – including ten presentations from City Manager Clapper to small, cherry-picked insiders’ groups – City Manager Clapper and Wastewater Superintendent Reel now contend that six or more years of waste importation would be mere experimentation. Isn’t it obvious that use of the term experimentation for their proposed effort is a transparent attempt to downplay a project that the vendor on which they rely candidly admits would use ‘a truck loop really specified for heavy truck traffic’?