Nevada County Picayune and Gurdon Times Newspaper Archive

Into The Void with John Miller

City Of Progress?

How can Prescott call itself the "City of Progress" when the city council's health committee will be recommending a business be turned down at its August meeting?

Aegis Biomedical has offered to open a site in Prescott, and asked little in return from the city. Its request was for the city to lease it two acres of land at the city's old landfill and run utilities to the site so it could treat medical waste. In return the company said it would pay all tipping fees in taking its treated waste to the regional landfill in Nashville, pay a "rebate" of 1.75 cents per pound of waste treated up to 100,000 pounds a month and pay all utilities.

Aegis initially planned to hire five people paying from $9 to $16 per hour, depending on the duties of the employee. Jim Rayburn, with Aegis, told the Prescott City Council at its July meeting the company planned to increase this to 20 employees over a five-year period.

The council, as has been reported, hastily created a health committee to look into the matter. Four days later three of the committee members said they recommend not helping Aegis locate in Prescott because people are afraid of having medical waste transported through town.

However, people, this is what the city will be passing up should Aegis just chuck the whole idea assuming the council nixes helping them. First, the salaries for five people at $9 per hour for a year totals $84,400. The "rebate" would run around $21,600 annually once the operation was going at peak efficiency. Tipping fees would be $15,600 a year, bringing the total to $121,600 annually in losses to Prescott.

Now, this doesn't include the peripheral monies involved. The company would be paying for electricity, water and natural gas. The city would be paid for electricity and water and sewer

The employees have to have somewhere to live, which means buying a house or renting. This means more money being spent locally, because they also have to have utilities and eat.

In addition, the employees and company would be buying gasoline locally, and those working for Aegis in Prescott may well purchase their personal vehicles here as well.

Should those employees be married and have children, this would translate into about $4,000 per child for the school district, not counting the money the family would be spending on taxes, both real and personal.

Studies have shown for each industrial job created seven services jobs come into existence. This means with five at Aegis, the end result would mean another 35 jobs in other areas in the city  with each of these workers paying the same taxes, utilities and having much the same needs.

But the committee said people feared the possibility of a medical waste spill when being hauled through town.

Folks, this is the last thing anyone needs to be worried about. Take, for example, the railroad and what's being hauled up and down the tracks every day, several times a day in fact. There are chemicals being transported by rail with the capability of wiping out all life in Nevada County in the event of a spill.

Let's take a look at the trucking industry. It, too, hauls dangerous chemicals up and down the highways and interstates. In fact there have been several chemical spills in the last few years in and near Prescott. Fortunately, none of the chemicals has been hazardous or this could easily be a ghost town.

However, no one has said let's stop the trucking industry from operating in Prescott. Nor has anyone suggested Love's or Norman's be closed, or even Rip Griffin's be told they aren't wanted. Instead, these businesses have been welcomed with open arms.

Why? The answer is simple, they employ more than five people. Numbers. The health committee said it wasn't worth trying to change public opinion over five jobs, but had it been 200 jobs it would have been.

One accident with a truck hauling hazardous waste could depopulate the city. If an Aegis trailer lost its load, the worst case scenario would be a fine for the company and it paying for the cleanup. No lives would be lost.

Here's a fun thought, medical waste is already being handled in Prescott and Nevada County. Many hospice care patients toss their medical waste into the garbage, which is then taken to the curb, picked up by city workers and taken to the landfill to be buried untreated. And, there are those diabetics who toss what is medical waste into their trash cans at home. This waste includes the lancets used to pierce the skin to test blood sugar, the blood coated testing strips and the syringes used to inject insulin. Again, all this goes into household waste, untreated, and taken to the landfill.

Once again, how can the city call itself progressive under these circumstances? It can't.