Grand Marais Public Utilities Commission board members voted unanimously to forgive the bill for more than 1 million gallons of water leaked from the Cook County Community YMCA swimming pool due to a rock stuck in a mechanical valve at the bottom of the pool.
The leak occurred for about one month (from mid-May to mid-June) before being discovered during a random check by PUC meter readers. Swimming pool attendants didn’t notice the missing water because the pool is automatically refilled to maintain a constant depth.
The board agreed in principal to forgive the bill at its previous meeting, but needed a letter from Cook County Maintenance Director Brian Silence asking for the $18,200 charges to be forgiven, which they received at their regular July 6 meeting. The county owns and maintains the YMCA building.
“We are asking to have the sewer charges dismissed due to the fact that the pool does not drain into the city sewer system,” wrote Silence.
It is standard policy for the PUC to forgive the first leak for a business or individual if it goes undetected and is not the fault of the owner. However, a second leak in similar circumstances is not forgiven.
PUC seeks to address climate change
PUC board member George Wilkes gave a report about his meetings with the city’s electrical provider, Southern Minnesota Municipal Power Agency (SMMPA). At SMMPA’s last meeting in Rochester, Minnesota, Wilkes presented a proposal on behalf of Grand Marais PUC to SMMPA about opening up a discussion on climate change.
Wilkes noted there is a promising solution to climate change that is being promoted by Citizens Climate Lobby (CCL), which is calling for a national proposal to establish a carbon pricing policy known as Carbon Fee and Dividend (CFD).
Recently, Grand Marais PUC passed a resolution recognizing climate change as a serious threat to the future well-being of the community and in that resolution, encouraged the U.S. Congress to address that threat by enacting federal CFD legislation.
In part of his address to SMMPA Wilkes wrote, “Climate change solutions are upon us. They come in two flavors: One is what we now have—a hodgepodge of local, state, and national regulations, standards and subsidies. This approach has been shown to be wholly inadequate, cumbersome, expensive, and unfair. The other flavor is a national market-based approach such as cap-and-trade or a revenue neutral carbon pricing system of which CFD is an eminently viable example….
“We hope that someday other member utilities and SMMPA might follow Grand Marais’s lead and come to advocate for CFD as a climate change solution…
“Our suggestion is for the SMMPA board to ask SMMPA staff to develop a process within SMMPA to more formally address climate change issues,” Wilkes wrote.
PUC Chair Karl Hansen told Wilkes that he thought the climate change document was easy to read, well thought-out and probably made too much sense for them to accept. Wilkes replied that SMMPA agreed to discuss the matter further, and he was hopeful that other member utilities would join with Grand Marais on promoting a national carbon fee and dividend policy and keep the discussion going within the large utility.
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