Grand Marais Public Utilities Commission (PUC) met Wednesday, October 18 and looked over an initial budget for 2018.
City Administrator Mike Roth attended a Southern Minnesota Municipal Power Agency (SMMPA) meeting the week before and reported that SMMPA wasn’t calling for a rate hike for next year.
But instead, SMMPA presented a variety of circumstances that could cause a rate hike in 2018, Roth told the board.
SMMPA generates and sells electricity to 18 nonprofit, municipally-owned member utilities, with Grand Marais being one of those members.
A topic of discussion was the city’s wastewater plant. Since receiving notice in the summer of 2016, Grand Marais staff has continued talks with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) over the agency’s request that the city keep its effluent below 1.3 nanograms per liter of mercury in its treated water.
Grand Marais is one of 12 communities whose treated water goes into Lake Superior. All of those cities have been asked by MPCA to meet the new mercury limit.
The city has hired Advanced Engineering Ae2S, an environmental and civil engineering company headquartered in Grand Forks, North Dakota, to do a facilities study.
PUC board chair Karl Hansen said because of the MPCA request the board is looking at potentially upgrading the entire plant, which he said was 20-25 years old.
Every five years MPCA issues new wastewater permits to cities, and the permit for Grand Marais has expired.
Another big unknown, said Hansen, was the work that would be done on the city storm sewer system when the state redoes Highway 61 through town. That work will be done in the summer of 2019.
“How much is that going to cost? A couple of hundred thousand dollars? Maybe more. We don’t know at this time,” said Hansen.
A piece of good news was that due to a recent decision by the SMMPA board to pay a substantial rate for solar generated power, the city was going to be able to afford to install solar panels on the almost completed public facilities building.
For almost one year the PUC has been discussing the possibility of installing solar panels on the public works facility which is located on the old Tomteboda Motel property.
As solar power technology has advanced and the price to purchase and install more efficient solar panels has decreased, it has become more common for units of government and private citizens to pursue this application of clean electrical generation.
At the July 20 PUC meeting board member George Wilkes made a motion seconded by Tim Kennedy to ask the Grand Marais City Council to investigate installing a 10 to 30 kW solar PV system for the public works facility. Board chair Karl Hansen voted with Wilkes and Kennedy to pass the motion unanimously.
Solar panels will be installed on the southwest side of the roof. Just how many will be put up and when they will be connected isn’t known at this time, said Hansen, who added that the electricians currently working on the public works facility building were placing wiring and electrical features that would ease the transition of putting in the solar panels.
Leave a Reply